Irina Mashinskaya is a poet and essayist, the author of fifteen books of poetry, translations, essays, and prose in Russian, English, and German, as well as numerous magazine publications in various languages. She is the co-founder (with Oleg Wolf) of the literary project "StoSvet" (One Hundred and Svet) and co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk) of the anthology "The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry" (Penguin Classics, 2015). She is the recipient of several literary awards, including (with Boris Dralyuk) the Stephen Spender/Joseph Brodsky Prize. Born in Moscow, she has lived in America since 1991.

Irina Mashinskaya's book of selected poems includes texts from nine books. Collected for the first time in a single volume, they offer insight into the evolution of the author's complex and distinctive poetics in dialogue with a rapidly changing world: from the musical, dense, and always recognizable diction of the 1980s and 1990s to the more unexpected, conversational, and naked diction of the early 2000s, and then, progressively, to the increasingly labored breathing of the poems of the last decade, with their tragic thinness of air and irreversibly changing sound. Geomorphology is the science of the earth's relief, its rhythm, and its deep history. The book's title reflects Mashinskaya's interest, a physical geographer by training, in the definition and evolution of forms: landscape, poetry, human relationships, speech.