Description
Lost in Living presents Halyna Kruk’s unpublished work from the immediate “pre-invasion” years when life in Ukraine was marked by turmoil but full-scale war was not yet normalized.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 an award-winning Ukrainian poet, writer, translator, and scholar. The author of five poetry books and four children’s books, her short story collection, Anyone but Me, won the 2022 Kovaliv Fund Prize. A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails was her first poetry volume published in English. 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 and is a member of Ukrainian PEN. She lives and teaches in Lviv.
Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series
5.5″ x 8.5″ / 182 pages / ISBN 979-8-9865715-7-7 (2024)
