Anna Malihon’s poetry collection ‘Girl with a Bullet’ released in the USA

The US publishing house World Poetry Books has published Anna Malihon’s poetry collection “Girl with a Bullet” translated by Olena Jennings.

“I am grateful to Olena Jennings for her work, to World Poetry Publishing for believing in me, to Razom for Ukraine and my friends for their support. While I am preparing for the presentation tour, I am enjoying your warm support,” Anna Malihon wrote.

According to the publisher’s website, Malihon’s English-language debut is a collection of bold, powerful, and insightful poems composed both before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“The difficult fates voiced by the protagonists of Malihon’s poems intertwine with her own experience, weaving an alarming but beautiful world where the young grow old and love is met with war. This world, at first shocking, holds the reader in suspension, compelling a desire to rethink and reread. With deft allegory and startling metaphor, Malihon crafts a poetry that seeks to influence the course of events, to reroute history,” reads annotation to the book at the publisher’s website.

“Malihon writes in poetic chords that evoke folk tales as well as the details of war wounds and displacement,” poet and translator Olga Livshin commented. “The varied personas of her poems move far away and morph, pouring into other vessels in her surrealistic narration. She tells us about Ukrainian girls and women running ‘without saying goodbye / through the news, the noble mold of solemn speeches / through history, geography.’ This is the existence in fragmented stories between life and death, but there is also a voice insisting on ‘how tenderness is born in your transportable body.’ Olena Jennings’s translation is sensitive and specific. A beautiful poetry collection.”

Anna Malihon is a poet and writer. Malihon  is a member of the National Union of Writers of Ukraine and author of the collections “Burnt Skin” and “Rosary,” the novel “Teach Her How to Do It,” and others. Malihon’s texts have been translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, French, and Armenian.

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Images: Anna Malihon’s Facebook page

Copy editing: Joy Tataryn