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THE AGE OF SECRETS

THE AGE OF SECRETS

$21.00Price

ISBN: 978-1-7364323-9-6

Pub Date: Sept. 2022

Pages: 106


By Olena Jennings


In a minimalistic and narrative style, Olena Jennings’ The Age of Secrets reflects on the relationships between girls and the secrets they keep. Characters Natalie and Aja are both objects of the narrator’s affection. She sees the world through the lens of love for them, a lens colored by the senses, especially the sense of smell. The section “Paper Doll Album” connects with the author’s exhibition of the same title in which the poems were brought to life through textile art. The poems reach beyond the pages. “The Spell of History,” the second segment, concentrates on the themes of memory and history. Memory stretches back to include ancestors’ memories. History is in the happenings that have not quite become part of the past, such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic. The voices in these poems carry past trauma with them into the present Russian invasion of Ukraine. The final poems in the book address the war and offer images of hope.

    Ms. Jennings applies what is called a stream of consciousness approach that is more typically found in prose. She goes back and forth in time investigating the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the narrator and other characters who are usually not named. For her, the borderline between external and internal, images, words and thoughts seems very conditional, so that an observed lake associated with the words of a distressing conversation can be easily felt inside the body. The poems breathe with sensitivity and are followed by images of rituals performed by small girls and describe the things they keep. Different colors are used in the book to gently, perhaps subconsciously, prod the reader toward moods typically associated with those hues.

    —Oksana Lebedivna, The Ukrainian Weekly


    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 from the Ukrainian with Oksana Lutsyshyna of Kateryna Kalytko’s Nobody Knows Us Here and We Don’t Know Anyone is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press, while 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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