the story of a ficus, as told by a human who prefers to communicate with plants by Halyna Kruk
A poem from A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk, translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia M. Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, read by JoeAnn Hart
half a year of war
an abandoned ficus registers the events from the window
dreams of leaving through the window frames,
long since empty,
but no
an abandoned ficus can’t go anywhere, though the missile
gave it a glimmer of hope
and a sudden urge toward the outside world
few pages have survived from these chronicles of summer,
but if it rains, the ficus fills out
a person will enter the building, squeezing past the door,
that the shockwave unhinged:
not a home but an inn:
curtain rolled up by the wind, rooms filled with junk—
no clear way out
but the ficus below will survive and send out shoots
leave its broken pot
clasp the black lawn with thirsty roots
stand proud, grow, wait
for its old man’s shuffling slippers, heart-to-hearts,
simple plantish pleasures
A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk, translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia M. Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk (Arrowsmith Press)
These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine’s most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. 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 fi red and the missiles landed, the wooden shield, the printed book, reconstitutes itself.
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Halyna Kruk was born in 1974 in Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of five books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and four children’s books. She has garnered multiple awards for her writing, including the Ptyvitannia Zhyttia and Granoslov Prizes in 1997, the Step by Step prize for children’s books in 2003, the BookForum Best Book Award in 2021, the Smoloskyp Poetry Award, the Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize award, the “Hranoslav” Award, the Polish Gaude Polonia Fellowship, and the Kovaliv Foundation Prize for Prose in 2022. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, and she has translated from several languages into Ukrainian. Kruk has recently collaborated on poetry/music projects with musician Yurko Yefremov, and the singer Halyna Breslavets. She’s served as vice president of the Ukrainian PEN, holds a Ph.D in Ukrainian literature, and is professor of European and Ukrainian baroque literature at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv.
Translators
Amelia M. Glaser translates primarily from Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian. She is Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she holds the Chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderland, and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine. She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Literary Lrgacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising, and with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics. She is currently writing a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.
Yuliya Ilchuk is Assistant Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture at Stanford University. She is the author of an award-winning book Nikolai Gogol’s Hybrid Performance and a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poetry. Ilchuk’s most recent book project, The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine, revisits collective memory and trauma, post-memory, remembrance, memorials, and reconciliation in Ukraine.
Reader
JoeAnn Hart is the author of a collection of short fiction, Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, which won the 2022 Hudson Prize Black Lawrence Press, September 2023). Her most recent book is the crime memoir Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s. Her novels are Float, a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean, and Addled, a social satire. For more information, visit her website.