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LOST IN LIVING

LOST IN LIVING

$24.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9865715-7-7

Pub Date: Spring 2024

Pages: 180


By Halyna Kruk

Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, translators


Lost in Living presents Halyna Kruk’s unpublished work from the immediate “pre-invasion” years when life in Ukraine was marked by turmoil but full-scale war was not yet normalized. In these “dear poems that don’t pain [her] like those about the war do,” Kruk uses imagery and tone to underscore poetic agency, at times juxtaposing figurative language with a calm, direct voice to bring her poems to life. Nature cannot be relied on to sustain nor renew, and life is shown to be fundamentally vulnerable. “Calm” is a seductive state of mind capable of cunning, and the speaker is unable to find a place where she can thrive or grow. Still, daily tasks emerge as life-affirming and a welcome constant. It is ultimately a movement toward survival that drives the immediacy and urgency of Kruk’s poetry. Lost in Living is the sixteenth volume in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Poetry Series.


Halyna Kruk is a poet of lyrical spells and musical whispers. Her human-scale voice confronts the inhumane historical landscape out of which she speaks insisting on a personal life, the life of a human heart and its ancient search for a bit of light in the dark.

—Valzhyna Mort, Music for the Dead and Resurrected


    Lost in Living, a selection of Halyna Kruk’s breathtaking poems written during the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war paints haunting inner landscapes where dreams and reality’s multiplying shadows intertwine. A searing, lyrical, and timely meditation on loss, memory, death, and love, this deeply spiritual collection explores the poet’s dichotomy of emotions: “what’s wrong with us, why this confounding joy/to love this world, it’s enough to almost die/a few times,” “if death were a writer’s residency,/I would have applied long ago.” Masterfully translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, the poems act like a time machine, and Kruk’s alchemical self finds wonderment amid despair: “I’m still like a child/who got lost and found herself.”

    —Hélène Cardona, author of Life in Suspension


    At its best, poetry expresses and even anticipates the times. Although Halyna Kruk tells her own personal story in her important collection, Lost in Living, a glimpse of the era in which she is living is always apparent, and the brute facts of our recent history are never far from our reach in her haunting poems. Here, language is refined to express the essence of deeds and things, and her primary concern is for a deeply truthful telling of who we are and what the consequences are for our behavior in a post-modern world. In the hands of two deft and accomplished poet-translators, Kinsella and Orlowsky, who understand what Borges meant when he wrote that “the original is unfaithful to the translation,” Kruk comes alive in English, largely, I would argue, because of the translators’ ability and willingness to stay out of the way of these rich poems. This is literary translation at its best.

    —Bruce Weigl, author of Among Elms in Ambush and the forthcoming Apostle of Desire


    Halyna Kruk (1974) is an award-winning Ukrainian poet, writer, translator, and scholar. She is the author of five books of poetry, Grown-Up (2017), (Co)existence (2013), The Face beyond the Photograph (2005), Footprints on Sand, and Journeys in Search of a Home (both 1997), a collection of short stories, Anyone but Me (2021), which won the 2022 Kovaliv Fund Prize, and four children’s books, two of which have been translated into 15 languages. A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails was her first volume of poetry published in English (Arrowsmith Press, 2022). Her numerous literary awards include the Sundara Ramaswamy Prize, the 2023 Women in Arts Award, the 2021 BookForum Best Book Award, the Smoloskyp Poetry Award, the Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize, and the Hranoslov Award. She holds a PhD in Ukrainian baroque literature (2001). Kruk is a member of Ukrainian PEN; she lives and teaches in Lviv.



    Ali Kinsella holds an MA in Slavic studies from Columbia University and has been translating from Ukrainian for twelve years. She won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize for her translation of Taras Prokhasko’s novella, Anna’s Other Days, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. In 2021, she was awarded a Peterson Literary Fund grant to translate Vasyl Makhno’s Eternal Calendar. She co-edited Love in Defiance of Pain (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war. Her other published translations include pieces by Stanislav Aseyev, Lyubko Deresh, Kateryna Kalytko, Myroslav Laiuk, Bohdana Matiiash, Olena Stiazhkina, and others.



    Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart Prize poet, award-winning translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She is author of six poetry collections including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a Sheila Motton Book Award, and a co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series.  Her new poetry book, Those Absences Now Closest, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon in fall 2024.


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