Featuring Halyna Kruk’s Translated Works: "A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails"
This month, SVI Library is proud to feature A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk as one of our Book of the Month selections, alongside other compelling works. We celebrate Halyna Kruk's remarkable achievements, including her shortlist nomination for the prestigious 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. Being shortlisted is a significant honour that recognizes the profound impact of her work. Congratulations to all the shortlisted poets of the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize!
Call Number: PG 3950.21 .R85 A2 2023
ISBN: 9798986340197 (paperback)
Pub. Info: Medford, MA : Arrowsmith Press, [2023]
“We act like children with our dead,” Halyna Kruk writes as she struggles to come to terms with the horror unfolding around her: “confused,/ as if none of us knew until now/ how easy it is to die.” In poem after devastating poem, Kruk confronts what we would prefer not to see: “a person runs toward a bullet/ with a wooden shield and a warm heart...” Translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine.
These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine’s most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. In a dark recapitulation of evolution itself, Kruk writes: “nothing predicted the arrival of humankind..../ nothing predicted the arrival of the tank...” Her taught, lean lines can turn epigrammatic: “what will kill you will seduce you first,” or they can strike you like Lomachenko’s lightening jabs: “flirt, Cheka agent, bitch.”
Leading readers into the world’s darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection. Naming serves as a shield, albeit a wooden one. The paradox is that after the bullets have been fired and the missiles landed, the wooden shield, the printed book, reconstitutes itself.
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/preorder/a-crash-course-in-molotov-cocktails
Enjoy this bilingual poetry reading of “mama - i'm a - pit,” read first in Ukrainian by Halyna Kruk, followed by the English translation by Amelia M. Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk. This poem is excerpted from their 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize-longlisted collection, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (Arrowsmith Press).
Halyna Kruk (1974) is a poet and prose writer, translator, and scholar from Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of six books of poetry, The BookWar (2023), An Adult Woman (2017), Co(an)existence (2013), The Face beyond the Photograph (2005), Footprints on Sand and Journeys in Search of a Home (both 1997), collection of short stories Anyone but me (2021), and four books for children. Her Marko Travels Around the World and The Littlest One have been translated into 15 languages. She is a winner of numerous literary awards abroad and in Ukraine, among them The Sundara Ramaswamy Prize, The 2023 Women in Arts Award, The 2022 Kovaliv Fund Prize for her proze book Anyone but me, The Best Book Award of BookForum 2021, Smoloskyp Poetry Award, Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize and “Hranoslov” Award. She has been shortlisted for shortlist for The 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her works have been translated into more than 30 languages. The latest of Kruk’s books of poems A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (2023) and Lost in Living (2024) were published in biligual Ukrainian-English version in U.S. (in translation of Amelia Glaser, Yulia Ilchuk, Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky). Kruk holds a PhD in Ukrainian baroque literature (2001) and is a member of the Ukrainian PEN. She lives in Lviv and teaches European and Ukrainian baroque literature at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv.
https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/event/poetics-war-experience-contemporary-ukrainian-literature
