In Eugene Ostashevsky's The Feeling Sonnets, his fourth collection of poems, words, idioms, sentences, and poetic conventions are dislodged and defamiliarized in order to convey the experience of living in a land-and language-apart. The book consists of four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion: whether "we feel the feelings that we call ours." The second cycle, mainly composed of "daughter sonnets, " describes bringing up children in a foreign country and a foreign language. The third cycle, called "Die Schreibblockade, " German for writer's block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma, in this case the Siege of Leningrad of 1941-1944. The fourth cycle is about translation. The sonnets are followed by a short libretto, commissioned by the Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti, about Ravel's interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand"--