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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.
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 beat with a subterranean thrum of hope.
With a foreword by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, this selection of Zhadan's poetry, forged entirely in wartime, 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.
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 beat with a subterranean thrum of hope.
With a foreword by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, this selection of Zhadan's poetry, forged entirely in wartime, 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.
About the author
Born in the Luhansk Region of Ukraine and educated in Kharkiv, Serhiy Zhadan is Ukraine's beloved literary and activist voice, considered to be one of the most important young writers in Ukraine. He has received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, the German Peace Prize, several international literature prizes. Twice won BBC Ukraine's Book of the Year award. His previous books include "Mesopotamia"; "The Orphanage"; and "What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poems". Zhadan's books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.