Dzvinia Orlowsky (original) (raw)
Those Absences Now Closest
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2024
Cover Image: Miroslaus Orlowsky (Ohio, c. 1964)
l to r: Nadia Fedun (close family friend), Dzvinia, Maria (Dzvinia’s sister), Tamara (Dzvinia’s mother)
“Those Absences Now Closest documents, with adroit craft and virtuosity, not only ubiquitous human grief and cruelty but also war’s disastrous toll on the natural world: (‘ask the horse if it knows // to what peace your body rushed off // after the catastrophic fire.’) To this urgent, masterly testament of love and mourning, Orlowsky lends healing elements of family history, surreal struggle and surprise, and folkloric magic that bring to mind Chagall’s captivating paintings.”
― Cyrus Cassells
“Dzvinia Orlowsky’s sensitively attuned poems listen for the beating animal heart of absences wrought by war and exile. They ask, ‘what holds us / to the colorless burn // of family’ and who is keeping count of the dead when the homeland is far and no one reports the bombings anymore. Those Absences Now Closest probes into the ‘language of cold air, blank canvas of distance’ to report with lyrical precision what’s not on the news.”
― Mira Rosenthal
“How does poetry enter this age? Our times are reflected back to us in screens of dazzling triviality and paralyzing crisis. Dzvinia Orlowsky’s brilliant new book is a vision quest. Her work has the empathy and imaginative authority to literally inhabit generational trauma. There’s a visceral directness in the tension between Prolog and Epilog, in the haunted mesmerizing voice that can bridge village Ukraine, Putin, and Twitter America. Mythic, gnomic, contemporary as the war being fought in the whites of our eyes, Those Absences Now Closest is a capstone to a superb career.”
― D. Nurkse
Lost in Living
Poems by Halyna Kruk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky
Generously supported by a 2024 translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“Halyna Kruk is a poet of lyrical spells and musical whispers. Her human-scale voice confronts the inhumane historical landscape out of which she speaks insisting on a personal life, the life of a human heart and its ancient search for a bit of light in the dark.”
—Valzhyna Mort, Music for the Dead and Resurrected
“Lost in Living, a selection of Halyna Kruk’s breathtaking poems written during the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war paints haunting inner landscapes where dreams and reality’s multiplying shadows intertwine. A searing, lyrical, and timely meditation on loss, memory, death, and love, this deeply spiritual collection explores the poet’s dichotomy of emotions: “what’s wrong with us, why this confounding joy/to love this world, it’s enough to almost die/a few times,” “if death were a writer’s residency,/I would have applied long ago.” Masterfully translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, the poems act like a time machine, and Kruk’s alchemical self finds wonderment amid despair: “I’m still like a child/who got lost and found herself.”
—Hélène Cardona, Life in Suspension
“At its best, poetry expresses and even anticipates the times. Although Halyna Kruk tells her own personal story in her important collection, Lost in Living, a glimpse of the era in which she is living is always apparent and the brute facts of our recent history are never far from our reach in her haunting poems. Here, language is refined to express the essence of deeds and things, and her primary concern is for a deeply truthful telling of who we are and what the consequences are for our behavior in a post-modern world. In the hands of two deft and accomplished poet-translators, Kinsella and Orlowsky, who understand what Borges meant when he wrote that “the original is unfaithful to the translation,” Kruk comes alive in English, largely, I would argue, because of the translators’ ability and willingness to stay out of the way of these rich poems. This is literary translation at its best.”
—Bruce Weigl, Among Elms in Ambush and the forthcoming Apostle of Desire
Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow
Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets
Translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky
Finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, ALTA’s National Translation Book Award in Poetry and 2022 winner of the AAUS Translation Prize.
“It is difficult for poems to make their way into the world under the best of circumstances. The art requires a disciplined inwardness and an ear profoundly attentive to the music of language. For poems to then find their way, alive, into another language requires great good fortune and the selfless commitment of translator poets equal to the original. For them to arrive in the shimmering English of a master poet such as Dzvinia Orlowsky, collaborating with master translator Ali Kinsella, is something of a miracle. But, as we see here, miracles do sometimes occur.”
– Askold Melnyczuk, author of The Man Who Would Not Bow
“What a gift to the reader that the author of these poems embraces translation as its own act of creation, not slavish attention to original work that can result in a soul gutting process. Under translators Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky’s meticulous considerations, Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poems live and breathe in English, yet are suffused with Natalka’s voice, with her great heart beating deep within the work. To read this book is to understand shy Bilotserkivets blessed the translations of Kinsella and Orlowsky. Her poems couldn’t have been left in better hands.”
– Catherine Sasanov, author of Had Slaves
Purchase online at Lost Horse Press
Bad Harvest
A Massachusetts Book Awards
2019 “Must Read” in Poetry
“Even after a bad harvest, there must be a sowing.” – Seneca the Younger
“Dzvinia Orlowsky’s sixth book, Bad Harvest, is the book that stakes her claim to an oeuvre, her own territory in American letters. Orlowsky’s voice is stunningly intimate, perhaps because these poems really look outward. Grounded in the funkiness of family love, marriage, the body in time, they turn to face history—our contemporary vortex, and the nightmares of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.”
– D. Nurkse
“This collection simmers with the magical ingredients of an Eastern European medicine woman’s brew. Bad Harvest releases its potency poem by poem, entrapping and entrancing with its candor and Orlowsky’s deep-rooted intuitions and seductively quirky humor.”
– Mihaela Moscaliuc
“Like a hornet caught in a jar, there is our world buzzing inside Orlowsky’s prose poems, buzzing between words, yes, but also between silences. I started reading with these prose poems and couldn’t stop. And then: opened the village of her lyrics, where line-breaks’ bulging veins throb to a music all their own. Here, the streets are flecked with images, with feather and bone. Orlowsky’s is a world where the poet blesses all that is washed with saliva, all that has a pinch of salt. With these poems, the boring prose of reality we all want to escape is buried in a wake of hoofs. But what is this poet’s wisdom? Orlowsky looks back on this village of her days: Remember it, she says, for its silence // the hill where you staked your life. And what, exactly, do we take from it? She shows how to go on: Thank you doctor, / it must be so, each bone depleted–/each wish revealed. It is, indeed, revealing, beautiful work.”
– Ilya Kaminsky
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