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NOBODY KNOWS US HERE & WE DON'T KNOW ANYONE

NOBODY KNOWS US HERE & WE DON'T KNOW ANYONE

$24.00Price

ISBN: 978-1-7364323-8-9

Pub Date: Sept. 2022

Pages: 112


By Kateryna Kalytko

Olena Jennings and Lutsyshyna, translators


Kateryna Kalytko's sophisticated poetry volume, Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don’t Know Anyone, deals with separations and changes, hinting at the ongoing war in Ukraine. One can intuit that the characters, succinctly depicted, are Crimean Tatars, Jews, or the displaced citizens of Ukraine, refugees from the occupied territories. However, these departures and partings, acute alienation and pain that permeate the poems, could also be read as elements of a more philosophical and global matrix, relevant to any region and each and every human being. Losses, wars, and abandoned houses in Kalytko’s poetry are elevated to the realm of the universal myth of home and its loss, akin to the banishment from the garden of Eden. Kalytko’s visual images are stunningly detailed, and her poetic language rich and exuberant.

    They were singing a folk song.

    The language broke at the folds

    and the shards sparkled like coal. The throat prickled, as if people were calling the someone who would not come,

    who had never come yet. And I wanted to cry and to join them,

    so that my lungs would break from my chest: two boats—let’s say, Tenderness and Longing, froze near the wharf.

    They could not sail off, moored to this chilly air

    by the larynx and trachea.

    I wanted to cry and to escape,

    to leave, not wasting time, far away, never to return,

    and when at the border they ask, “What is in your luggage?”

    I open the bag with ringing fragments

    and I cannot explain what broke.

    All the words have flown out

    into an enduring winter song.


    —Kateryna Kalytko


    Kateryna Kalytko was born in Vinnytsia in 1982. She is an acclaimed poet, writer and translator who has published multiple collections of poetry and prose. Her work has been translated into English, Polish, German, Hebrew, Russian, Armenian, Italian, and Serbian. She has been the recipient of many literary awards and fellowships, among them the Central European Initiative Fellowship for Writers in Residence (2015) and Ukraine BBC Award for fiction (2017). 


    Olena Jennings is a writer and translator, the author of the poetry collection Songs from an Apartment and the chapbook Memory Project. Her novel Temporary Shelter was released in 2021 by Cervena Barva Press. Glagoslav Publications released Artem Chekh’s Absolute Zero in 2020, translated from the Ukrainian with Oksana Lutsyshyna, and Lost Horse Press published Pray to the Empty Wells in 2019, co-translated with Iryna Shuvalova. Her translation of Vasyl Makhno’s poetry collection Paper Bridge will soon be released by Plamen Press. Olena Jennings is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens Reading Series.


    Oksana Lutsyshyna is an award-winning writer, translator, and literary scholar. The latest of her poetry collections, Persephone Blues, was published in the English translation in 2019 by Arrowsmith. Her latest novel Ivan and Phoebe (2019) has been awarded the UNESCO Lviv City of Literature Award in 2020, and Shevchenko National Prize (2021). 

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