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ECCENTRIC DAYS OF HOPE AND SORROW

ECCENTRIC DAYS OF HOPE AND SORROW

$24.00Price

ISBN: 978-1-7364323-2-7

Pub Date: Sept. 2021

Pages: 212


By Natalka Bilotserkivets

Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, translators


The eighth volume in Lost Horse Press’s Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry series, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow brings together a selection of Natalka Bilotserkivets poetry written over the last four decades. Having established an English language following largely on the merits of a single poem, Bilotserkivets’s larger body of work continues to be relatively unknown. Natalka Bilotserkivets was an active participant in Ukraine’s Renaissance of the late-Soviet and early independence period. Now, nearly thirty years on, much has changed in the land of her birth, but the lyricism and urgency in Bilotserkivets’s poetry remain; her voice still speaks about movement and restricted movement, even symbolic movement. Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow endeavors to go back to shed light on the missing history.


    Natalka Bilotserkivets’ work, known for lyricism and the quiet power of despair, became hallmarks of Ukraine’s literary life of the 1980s and 1990s. The collections Allergy (1999) and Central Hotel (2004) were the winners of Book of the Month contests in 2000 and 2004 respectively. In the West, she’s mostly known on the strength of a handful of widely translated poems, while the better part of her oeuvre remains unknown. She lives and works in Kyiv. Her poem, “We’ll Not Die in Paris,” became the hymn of the post-Chornobyl generation of young Ukrainians that helped topple the Soviet Union.



    Ali Kinsella has been translating from Ukrainian for eight years. Her published works include essays, poetry, monographs, and subtitles to various films. She holds an MA from Columbia University, where she wrote a thesis on the intersection of feminism and nationalism in small states. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Ali lived in Ukraine for nearly five years. She is currently in Chicago, where she also sometimes works as a baker.



    Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart prize poet, translator, and founding editor of Four Way Books. She is author of six poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her translation from the Ukrainian of Alexander Dovzhenko’s novella, The Enchanted Desna, was published by House Between Water Press in 2006, and in 2014, Dialogos published Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish poet Mieczslaw Jastrun for which she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.



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