Food for the Dead: ‘Beautiful and necessary’ Ilya Kaminsky

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight's first collection about Ukrainian identity is a powerful howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism. It examines the legacy of the Holodomor, Stalin's man-made famine of the 1930s, and the current war in Ukraine. Through the poet's sensitive approach to the historical, we understand that Holodomor lives on in the bones of the Ukrainian people.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 80 pages
Publication date: 22 February 2024
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

Winner of an Eric Gregory Award, this searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism. A beautiful, necessary book, ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic, says, "Every poem is a masterpiece." OLIA HERCULES, author of Mamushka, adds, "With this searingly powerful first collection, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within a wider and more accurate historical context."

Central to this book is "a timeline of hunger," a lyric sequence that examines the legacy of the Holodomor (death by hunger in Ukrainian) - Stalin's man-made famine of the 1930s. This long poem opens in Kyiv in 2021 - "brief visitations / of appetite / I devour / beetroot / its juices / running / down my lips / blood / of the past - and closes in Donetsk in 1929: "we burst the balloon / skin of tomatoes / between our teeth / seeds running down chins / like confetti / & we already know / every meal / should be celebrated." Through the poet's sensitive approach to the historical, moving from that genocide of the early 1930s, then on through the Second World War, the Chornobyl disaster, to modern-day invaded Ukraine, we understand that within their "bones Holodomor / lives on."

Both a howl of anguish and an eloquent counter-song against totalitarianism, this is a book about invasion, war, destruction, and death, but also about the bonds of humanity, family, and a history of oppression - about staying alive while always hungry.

Weight: 102g
Dimension: 196 x 131 x 7 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781787334892