Food for the Dead: 'Beautiful and necessary' Ilya Kaminsky by Charlotte Shevchen

Description: Food for the Dead by Charlotte Shevchenko Knight This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism**WINNER OF AN ERIC GREGORY AWARD***SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 FORWARD PRIZE - FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION*This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianismA beautiful, necessary bookILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf RepublicEvery poem is a masterpieceOLIA HERCULES, author of MamushkaWith 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 which examines the legacy of the Holodomor (death by hunger in Ukrainian) - Stalins 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 poets 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. FORMAT Paperback CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a poet of both British and Ukrainian heritage. Her debut pamphlet Ways of Healing was a winner of the New Poets Prize. Shevchenko Knight has an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London and is based in York. She is a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Review Gathering the tribes of the living and the dead, wooing the ghosts of history and the present, these are compelling testimonies in defence of dream (which is to say memory) against death (which is to say oblivion); a book of poems (which is to say spells) that insist, despite all the evidence, that language can still be a crystal ball through which we can see all our departed loves. Here history comes alive, which is to say it comes to hurt us again. A beautiful, necessary book -- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf RepublicOpening Food for the Dead, I was not prepared for the sheer force of its telling: in poem after poem about grandmothers, unendurable hunger and the glorious intransigence of survival, Shevchenko Knight generates an irresistible momentum that carries the reader into a world at once familiar and strange, where an improbable beauty and nobility of spirit coexist with routine corruption, needless misery and the casual brutality of totalitarianism -- John Burnside, author of Black Cat BoneFood for the Dead will break your heart and feed your soul. Every line holds the truth, the collective memories of Ukraine beyond history books and news headlines. I have been waiting for poems like this for years – every one of them a masterpiece -- Olia Hercules, author of MamushkaThese poems are hungry, burning, outraged and tender; they will make your mouth water while simultaneously hollowing your bones. An astonishing, lacerating, unforgettable debut, full of acutely evocative poems of food and famine in Ukraine, and of an adolescence lived in the shadow of trauma and extreme hunger. These are poems of deep beauty, furious survival, and abiding familial love -- Fiona Benson, author of EphemeronSimply radiating... The writing filled me with a longing for home I had concealed within my inner chambers -- Eric Ngalle Charles, author of I, Eric NgalleThis extraordinary, beautiful book combines the personal and the political: Ukraines tragic past and bloody present providing the backdrop to poems about grandparents, hunger, childhood, and collective memory – all of them poignant and pitch-perfect -- Luke Harding, author of InvasionThese poems break an opening through into a space and time that is both vast – from Soviet famine to present-day invasion, from England to Donetsk - and intimate: kitchen work, coal dust, pickles. With great clarity, Shevchenko Knight evokes a Ukraine where the very food is haunted by memories of mass hunger, where for her grandparents it is hope, defiance, love, simply to be and to do -- James Meek, author of The Peoples Act of Love Details ISBN1787334899 Author Charlotte Shevchenko Knight Pages 80 Publisher Vintage Publishing Year 2024 ISBN-13 9781787334892 Format Paperback Publication Date 2024-02-22 Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom AU Release Date 2024-02-22 NZ Release Date 2024-02-22 UK Release Date 2024-02-22 Alternative 9781529923346 Audience General ISBN-10 1787334899 Subtitle Beautiful and necessary Ilya Kaminsky We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:160280407;

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