A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails. This item is unavailable.A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails

"We act like children with our dead," Halyna Kruk writes as she struggles to come to terms with the horror unfolding around her: "confused,/ as if none of us knew until now/ how easy it is to die." In poem after devastating poem, Kruk confronts what we would prefer not to see: "a person runs toward a bullet/ with a wooden shield and a warm heart..." Translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine.

These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine's most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. In a dark recapitulation of evolution itself, Kruk writes: "nothing predicted the arrival of humankind..../ nothing predicted the arrival of the tank..." Her taught, lean lines can turn epigrammatic: "what will kill you will seduce you first," or they can strike you like Lomachenko's lightening jabs: "flirt, Cheka agent, bitch."

Leading readers into the world's darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection. Naming serves as a shield, albeit a wooden one. The paradox is that after the bullets have been fired and the missiles landed, the wooden shield, the printed book, reconstitutes itself. 

Halyna Kruk was born in 1974 in Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of five books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and four children's books. She has garnered multiple awards for her writing, including the Ptyvitannia Zhyttia and Granoslov Prizes in 1997, the Step by Step prize for children's books in 2003, the BookForum Best Book Award in 2021, the Smoloskyp Poetry Award, the Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize award, the "Hranoslav" Award, the Polish Gaude Polonia Fellowship, and the Kovaliv Foundation Prize for Prose in 2022. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, and she has translated from several languages into Ukrainian. Kruk has recently collaborated on poetry/music projects with electronic musician Yurko Yefremov, and the singer Halyna Breslavets. She's served as vice president of the Ukrainian PEN, holds a Ph.D in Ukrainian literature, and is professor of European and Ukrainian baroque literature at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv.

Amelia M. Glaser translates primarily from Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian. She is Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she holds the Chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia's LiteraryBorderlands (Northwestern U.P., 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford U.P., 2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (U. Toronto Press, 2020). She is currently writing a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.

Yuliya Ilchuk is Assistant Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture at Stanford University. She is the author of an award-winning book Nikolai Gogol's Hybrid Performance (published at University of Toronto Press, 2021) and a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poetry. Ilchuk's most recent book project, The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine, revisits collective memory and trauma, post-memory, remembrance, memorials, and reconciliation in Ukraine.