Alexei Parshchikov was one of the most brilliant and accomplished Russian poets of his generation. Born in 1954 near Vladivostok, and trained as an agricultural scientist, Parshchikov combined a keen eye for the beauty of the rural landscape with an uncompromising view of the ruin wrought by chemical poisoning and industrial waste.
In the 1980s Parshchikov, together with Ivan Zhdanov, Alexander Eremenko and other predominantly Moscow-based poets, formed a group whose work, described by critics as metarealist or metametaphorist, specialized in elaborate spatial meontic metaphorical structures, often with mathematical or scientific supports, set into loosened versions of traditional prosody.
After his move to California in 1990, Parshchikov built extensive personal and intellectual connections with the American experimental poetry community, especially the poet Michael Palmer and critic Marjorie Perloff. Work of his late period, composed in Germany in the 2000s, is marked by an even greater complexity of image and narrative, as well as reflexion on his experience as a photographer.