Danila Davydov's afterword to and here's about tenderness
The latest trends in understanding poetry as engaged art, the displacement of aesthetics not only by politics but by ethics, and the work aimed at bringing the lyrical subject as close as possible to the recipient - while acknowledging the inevitable boundary between them - all that constitutes the nerve of a significant part of innovative contemporary poetry was predicted in due time by the poetics of Alexander Manichenko, one of the most original and simultaneously unread poets of his generation.
Perhaps the point here is that the "direct statement" in Manichenko's work is always estranged not so much by metapositional reflection as by (counter)ironic internal dialogue between the lyrical subject and the intertextual author. In Manichenko's poetry, neo-modernist rigidity and tenderness form almost post-punk structures in mood, seemingly open in their avant-garde gesture, yet in reality airproof. The impossibility of unequivocal "slogan-like" conclusions - including in the experience of trauma, which is so important for contemporary poetry and is again very sophisticatedly estranged in Manichenko's work - makes these poems "uncomfortable" for those who seek purely extrapoetic justifications in poetry.