Food for the Dead
(By Charlotte Shevchenko Knight)
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| Author | Charlotte Shevchenko Knight |
This searingly powerful first collection about Ukraine identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism
Food for the Dead gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within the true 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), Stalin's 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 poet's sensitive approach to the historical, moving from that genocide of the early thirties, then on through World War II, 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 family, human lives and a history of oppression - about staying alive while always hungry.”
