Overwintered
Trio House Press • 2026
Overwintered is a debut collection of poetry that examines the space between Syrian, Russian, and American cultures. Navigating immigration, the book moves through the fractured landscapes of memory and inheritance that define the speaker’s translation of place, relationships, and time: “I say sister / but it comes out / solstice / each day the longest / since I have seen you.” Katrin’s spare yet lush poetry illuminates the constant acclimation and evolution of language, asking how we endure the long winters of displacement and what it means to emerge from them anew.
Praise for Overwintered
In a time of many paradoxical emotions for our siblings in Syria, where many in diaspora are now able to return for the first time in decades, here is a poetics that gazes unflinchingly at the imperial distances underpinning our present moment: the infinity between “make me” and “useful” (as with “make me” and “spectacle”) typed onto an immigration form, the death of a family member announced on Facebook, of Trader Joe’s conversations where there are more cousins than figs. Braiding in and out of forms just as deftly as through languages, I am truly mesmerized by Overwintered. Elina Katrin is simply one of the most exciting rising poets, and one of the most caring and brilliant practitioners of multilingual poetics, alive today.
—George Abraham, author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America
What makes this book inimitable is how it considers inheritance, not just of grief but also humor, food, romance, and moments of wonder. And as pages turn, so many marvels come into view. If there is a celebration, there is the slaughtered wedding lamb suspended by its legs nearby. If grandmother dies, she will still smile amongst yellow flowers. And even snowflakes will burn. Smile will be worn like a spear and the human body too will become a nature morte. All of which is to say: while we might all be overwintered by the end of our stay on this planet—only some can make poetry out of it. Elina Katrin has written a terrific book.
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
These poems of intellect and heart explore displacement in many forms, investigating both the seduction and the impossibility of belonging.
—Natalie Shapero, author of Stay Dead
Katrin’s strange and astounding poetry absolutely makes room for us to feel in language.
—Paige Lewis, author of Canon and Space Struck
This is poetry of constant flow and transformation.
—Irina Mashinski, author of The Naked World:
A Tale with Verse
If My House Has a Voice
Newfound • 2023
If My House Has a Voice (Newfound, 2023) serves as a guide through the immigrant narrative. A blurring of foreign and familiar, a tapestry of cultures and form, this debut chapbook attempts to decode the elusive: language, borders, and (un)belonging. The poems in If My House Has a Voice move across Syria, Russia, and America, inviting us to look beyond ourselves, into the ground and the people that shape us.
Praise for If My House Has a Voice
With If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin offers up a vivid, complex, multilingual self-portrait that is also a delightful, sharply rendered tribute to the myriad places and people to whom she belongs. These are poems that move, formally and emotionally: couplets leap across caesuras, ‘lax vowels [skew the] jaw,’ and histories meet in ways that catalyze a vibrant, surprising, embodied new music. Katrin’s verse makes every sense come alive.
—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
If My House Has A Voice is a passport of sorts; an invitation to traverse the neon fro-yo signs of L.A., the metro winds of St. Petersburg, the over abundance of Miami palms, and to see the moon rising over the mountains from the dance floor of a sticky Virginia bar. Elina Katrin acts as psychopomp between the deeply sensual world we know and another world slightly beyond description, knowing, or language. Katrin’s collection elegantly, incandescently, invites us in, and creates a space intimate enough for us to meet ourselves, wherever we may be.
—Candice Wuehle, author of MONARCH
With elegant, surprising enjambments, and pirouetting turns of phrase, Katrin’s poems invite us into its confusing and beautiful rooms.
—Philip Metres, author of Sand Opera
Moving through questions of faith, religion and language, the speaker is ‘invincible’ amid in the searching itself.
—Rosebud Ben-Oni, author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery
With a language that is startling in its truth, each poem forms on the page like a painting evoking the desire to be understood.
—Pauline Kaldas, author of The Measure of Distance
Reviews & Interviews
Katrin embraces the paradox of home as a concept, its inscrutable movement between abstraction and physiology, kinship and exile, and casts it into a language uniquely her own. A bricolage of languages, emojis, and blacked-out spaces, her voice is unencumbered by monolingual conventions and totalizing images: Her boundary-defying, border-crossing verse is unapologetically personal, yet so achingly relatable, it feels like a homecoming.
—Review in Tint Journal
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a Russian mother and a Syrian father, and currently living in Southern California, Katrin is profoundly aware of how living between cultures and languages both enriches and destabilizes the subject: in her work, multilingualism multiplies meaning, yet makes the mother tongue something which can be gradually forgotten, mixed with other languages, or, suddenly, spoken with an accent—somehow less authentically than before.
—Interview with Sofija Popovska for Asymptote