How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems

A searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, from iconic writer-activist Serhiy Zhadan

Finalist for the PEN America Literary Award for Poetry in Translation

“Reading these words now is enough to make one’s breath catch. [Ukraine’s western partners] do not see themselves as members of its funeral processions; they do not routinely line the streets and kneel before passing coffins.”—Linda Kinstler, Times Literary Supplement

Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought international attention to his country’s struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, Zhadan honors the memory of the lost and addresses the living, inviting us to consider what language can offer to a country threatened with extinction. Young lovers, marginalized outsiders, and ordinary citizens pulse with life in a composite portrait of a people newly unified by extremity. Even in the midst of enemy fire, Zhadan’s lyrical monuments, forged entirely in wartime, beat with a subterranean thrum of hope.

Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, and with a foreword by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, this selection of Zhadan’s poetry is an homage to the Ukrainian people, a forceful reckoning with the violence of the past and present, and an act of artistic imagination that breaks with trauma and charts a new future for Ukraine.
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