Featured image: Jana Astanov, Butterfly, 2023
Tony Oats reviews AvantGarden by Jana Astanov
AvantGarden, Jana Astanov, published by Speedball Books, 2026
Jana Astanov’s Avantgarden arrives like an erotic dream planted in mossy soil — part grimoire,
part field guide, part love letter to the body as a site of divine transmission. This is a collection
that refuses that polite and political distance so much contemporary poetry keeps between
speaker and reader, insisting instead on direct contact: skin to page, myth to muscle, spring thaw
to sex.
What’s most exciting here is the serious commitment to a cosmology. Astanov doesn’t gesture at
the sacred feminine from a safe critical remove; she inhabits it, speaks as it, becomes “praSlavic
vessel of / the green flame” and “self-proclaimed Goddess” without apology or hedge. That
confidence is rare, and it’s the engine of the whole book. In “PraSlavic Vessel,” ancestral
memory, eros, and ecology braid into a single continuous body: “Memories caress the Baltic Slav
skin, / Memories too old for Christ.” This is poetry doing what the best ritual writing has always
done. It collapses the distance between the personal and the cosmic until they’re
indistinguishable.
The nature imagery throughout is lush without being decorative; it’s working imagery, doing real
metabolic labor. “Avant-Spring flower” fuses Dada and thaw (“cracks boy seeds / and avant
spring flowers / make dada blossom”) in a way that feels genuinely new. This is not the avant-
garde as a historical movement to cite, but as a force of nature, recurring every year like
crocuses. Same with “Dragonite invaders,” where Brooklyn’s own McCarren Park becomes a
portal-site, myth grafted directly onto the geography of daily life. That’s a hard trick to pull off
(making the mystical feel like it’s happening on your own city block), but Astanov does it with
real ease.
The book’s most transporting passages come when the erotic and the cosmological fully merge:
“Solar deities” and “Cosmic lore” both build toward genuinely stunning cosmic-scale intimacy
(“extending a heart-Venus / to Jupiter / to the Sun / to the Moon”), a kind of astral pillow-talk
that earns its scale because the physical body is never abandoned along the way. And the closing
pieces – “Tectonic Language” and “Sanctuary” – bring the whole collection to a soft, dissolving
landing: sovereignty surrendered, the self undone “into foam and vapor,” returned to something
older than naming. It’s a generous way to end a book this bold: not with a final assertion of
power, but with a willing dissolution back into the source.
AvantGarden sits comfortably within Speedball’s ongoing project of publishing work that treats
the ecstatic, the occult, and the erotic as serious literary material rather than genre curiosities.
Astanov writes like someone who has fully surrendered to her own mythology, and the reader is
graciously and persuasively invited to surrender right along with her.
About Jana Astanov:
Jana Astanov is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and founder of CREATRIX Magazine, Red Temple Press and Speedball Books. Born in the Masuria (Mazury) Lake District of Poland and based in the United States, her writing explores myth, ecology, eros, ritual, and the living intelligence of language, where botanical, celestial, and human worlds continually transform into one another.
She is the author of six poetry collections: AvantGarden, Antidivine, Northern Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox.
About Tony Oats:
Tony Oats is an editor and critic whose work explores hysterical surrealism, experimental poetics, and the collapse of boundaries between prose and poetry. He edited Hysterical Surrealism, an anthology of contemporary prosetry.
