Issue XXXIII June 2022
Poetry from Ukraine
edited by Iryna Vikyrchak
Published in cooperation with https://chytomo.com/
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Victoria Amelina is a Ukrainian novelist, essayist and activist. She was born in 1986 in the city of Lviv, Ukraine. Victoria Amelina is winner of the Joseph Conrad literature prize 2021 and finalist of European Union Prize for Literature 2019. She is most known for her two novels, 'Fall Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens' and 'Dom’s Dream Kingdom'.
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Everything is possible in a poem. It is a safe space, a cage for our pains and fears, a bomb shelter, a breath of air when you get numb under the thunder of explosions.
Everything is possible within a poem. If literature is there to order the world’s chaos, then poetry is its most condensed form, thick, precise, and well sealed. You take a piece of reality, be it physical or metaphysical, you word it as if it were to be put in a frame, roll it up, put it in a bottle, and let it float on the surface of the ocean until it reaches its accidental addressee-the reader. Or not accidental at all-it is they-you-who decide. A poet or a poetess who becomes a witness, whether direct or indirect, of evil; of pain, suffering, loss, fear, or war; becomes, as observed by Ostap Slyvynskyi in his essay - a siever of reality, of words, to find the right ones and send the message to those under fire and to the rest of the world. I'd like to introduce you to those Sievers and their letter from a war-torn Ukraine. Iryna Vikyrchak, Editor, Issue XXXIII, June 2022 |
