**WINNER OF AN ERIC GREGORY AWARD**
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 FORWARD PRIZE - FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION*
This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism
'A beautiful, necessary book'
ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic
'Every poem is a masterpiece'
OLIA HERCULES, author of Mamushka
With this searingly powerful first collection, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within a wider and more accurate historical context.
Central to this book is a timeline of hunger , a lyric sequence which examines the legacy of the Holodomor ( death by hunger in Ukrainian) Stalin s man-made famine of the 1930s. This long poem opens in Kyiv in 2021 brief visitations / of appetite / I devour / beetroot / its juices / running / down my lips / blood / of the past and closes in Donetsk in 1929: we burst the balloon / skin of tomatoes / between our teeth / seeds running down chins / like confetti / & we already know / every meal / should be celebrated. Through the poet s sensitive approach to the historical, moving from that genocide of the early 1930s, then on through the Second World War, the Chornobyl disaster, to modern-day invaded Ukraine, we understand that within their bones Holodomor / lives on .
Both a howl of anguish and an eloquent counter-song against totalitarianism, this is a book about invasion, war, destruction and death, but also about the bonds of humanity, family and a history of oppression about staying alive while always hungry.
