How Fire Descends:New and Selected Poems (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by: Serhiy Zhadan (Author),Virlana Tkacz(Translator),Wanda Phipps(Translator),Ilya Kaminsky(Foreword)&1more

Publisher: Yale University Press

Publication Date: 2023/10/3

Language: English

Print Length: 136 pages

ISBN-10: 0300272464

ISBN-13: 9780300272468

Book Description

A searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, from iconic writer-activist Serhiy Zhadan   Finalist for the PEN America Literary Award for Poetry in Translation  “Reading these words now is enough to make one’s breath catch. [Ukraine’s weste partners] do not see themselves as members of its funeral processions; they do not routinely line the streets and kneel before passing coffins.”—Linda Kinstler, Times Literary Supplement   Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought inteational attention to his country’s struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, Zhadan honors the memory of the lost and addresses the living, inviting us to consider what language can offer to a country threatened with extinction. Young lovers, marginalized outsiders, and ordinary citizens pulse with life in a composite portrait of a people newly unified by extremity. Even in the midst of enemy fire, Zhadan’s lyrical monuments, forged entirely in wartime, beat with a subterranean thrum of hope.   Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, and with a foreword by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, this selection of Zhadan’s poetry is an homage to the Ukrainian people, a forceful reckoning with the violence of the past and present, and an act of artistic imagination that breaks with trauma and charts a new future for Ukraine.

About the Author

A searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, from iconic writer-activist Serhiy Zhadan   Finalist for the PEN America Literary Award for Poetry in Translation  “Reading these words now is enough to make one’s breath catch. [Ukraine’s weste partners] do not see themselves as members of its funeral processions; they do not routinely line the streets and kneel before passing coffins.”—Linda Kinstler, Times Literary Supplement   Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought inteational attention to his country’s struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, Zhadan honors the memory of the lost and addresses the living, inviting us to consider what language can offer to a country threatened with extinction. Young lovers, marginalized outsiders, and ordinary citizens pulse with life in a composite portrait of a people newly unified by extremity. Even in the midst of enemy fire, Zhadan’s lyrical monuments, forged entirely in wartime, beat with a subterranean thrum of hope.   Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, and with a foreword by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, this selection of Zhadan’s poetry is an homage to the Ukrainian people, a forceful reckoning with the violence of the past and present, and an act of artistic imagination that breaks with trauma and charts a new future for Ukraine.