Lost in Living: Literary Evening with Halyna Kruk

A literary evening with Halyna Kruk, an award-winning Ukrainian poet, writer, translator, and scholar.
In conversation with Oleh Kotsyuba, Director of Print and Digital Publications, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, and Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize poet and translator.

About the Books:
A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails - “We act like children with our dead,” Halyna Kruk writes as she struggles to come to terms with the horror unfolding around her: “confused,/ as if none of us knew until now/ how easy it is to die.” In poem after devastating poem, Kruk confronts what we would prefer not to see: “a person runs toward a bullet/ with a wooden shield and a warm heart...” Translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine.

These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine’s most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. Leading readers into the world’s darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection. Naming serves as a shield, albeit a wooden one. The paradox is that after the bullets have been fired and the missiles landed, the wooden shield, the printed book, reconstitutes itself.

Lost in Living - Translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, Lost in Living presents Halyna Kruk’s unpublished work from the immediate “pre-invasion” years when life in Ukraine was marked by turmoil but full-scale war was not yet normalized.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.

About the Author:
Halyna Kruk was born in Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of five books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and four children’s books. She has garnered multiple awards for her writing, including the Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize, the Polish Gaude Polonia Fellowship, the Bookforum Best Book Award, and the Kovaliv Foundation Prize for Prose. She has served as vice president of the PEN Ukraine, holds a Ph.D in Ukrainian literature, and is professor of European and Ukrainian baroque literature at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv.

About the Translator: Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize poet, translator, a Four Way Books founding editor, has authored seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest. Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia’s co-translations of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope & Sorrow was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize and winner of the 2020-2021 AAUS Prize for Translation. They received a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship for their translation of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living published by Lost Horse Press in 2024.

Links:
https://www.huri.harvard.edu/event/lo...
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https://losthorsepress.org/catalog/lo...