Poetry. Bilingual edition. Edited by poet and translator J. Kates, IN THE GRIP OF STRANGE THOUGHTS includes poems written long before 1990 but which could not be published, and those of more recent vintage. All of the featured poets were writing as Communism gave way at the turn of this decade. Together they depict the cascading changes in Russian life and culture -- from the most intimate details of private lives to the larger images of a nation itself coming to grips with a new identity -- as we come to the end of a decade, an historical era and a century.