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PRAY TO THE EMPTY WELLS

PRAY TO THE EMPTY WELLS

$20.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9991994-8-0

Pub Date: Sept. 2019

Pages: 180


By Iryna Shuvalova

Olena Jennings, translator


From one of Ukraine’s most distinct female voices in poetry, Pray to the Empty Wells is Iryna Shuvalova’s first book-length collection of poems in English.


Deeply rooted in Ukraine’s folk culture, Shuvalova’s poetry re-mixes traditional spirituality with pulsating eroticism and an acute awareness of the natural environment. Presented in dual-language format, the poems in this collection offer a long poetic meditation on memory and life’s natural cycles. Each word, like a life force, forms a connective substance that weaves between lines and verses. Though the wells are empty, Shuvalova’s language overflows with rich images, corporeality, and a metaphoric sensibility that reaches across place and time and reverberates as a prayer against ancient stone.

    Into The Sweet Orchard

    you will go, woman, into the sweet orchard

    a bone through a throat

    a chunk of clay that melts

    slowly burying yourself

    in the dark pond of his body


    you’ll go as if into a river

    first—a large fish

    with a white belly full of dreams

    second—a bloody berry

    a closed fist full of bitter seeds

    third—an empty jar

    with a narrow neck full of song


    each time you enter you won’t have a name

    each time you enter you’ll carry a mouthful of names

    you’ll swallow them beyond the gates

    so that again you won’t have any

    so that you can return


    —Iryna Shuvalova


    Iryna Shuvalova is a poet, translator and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine. She has authored three poetry collections in Ukrainian—Ran, Os and Az—winning some of the country’s top awards for poetry, including, in 2010, the first 1st place in the Smoloskyp Poetry Prize awarded in ten years. Her fourth book of poems is forthcoming in 2020 with The Old Lion Publishing House in Lviv. Iryna’s translations from Ukrainian and Russian appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation and Words without Borders, among others, while her own poetry has been widely anthologized in Ukraine and translated into nine languages beyond. In 2009, she also co-edited the first anthology of queer writing in Ukrainian translation. In 2012, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Having previously earned her MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College on a Fulbright scholarship, she is now a PhD student and a Gates Cambridge scholar at the University of Cambridge where she studies communities affected by the War in Donbas, Ukraine through the prism of war songs.



    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. 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.

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