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August 2025 Poetry Feature: Anna Malihon, translated by Olena Jennings

August 28, 2025 Poetry, Translation

Translated from the Ukrainian by OLENA JENNINGS

From Girl with a Bullet, forthcoming October 2025

Presented in Olena Jennings’ seamless translation, Anna Malihon’s new collection, Girl with a Bullet, is one of the most important books of the year for those with an interest in the fate of Ukraine, a gift to Anglophone readers.

—John Hennessy, poetry editor

Table of Contents:

[The girl with a bullet in her stomach]

[Don’t go into that home]

[Now the only thing that you can do for her, Christ,]

[Unfold and dive into me, to my very bone,]

*
The girl with a bullet in her stomach
runs across the highway to the forest
runs without saying goodbye
through the news, the noble mold of lofty speeches
through history, geography,
curfew, a day, a century

She is so young that the wind carries
her over the long boulevard between bridges
where Bishop Herman catches her
promises a good hospital
and promises not to grow airplanes
only tulips
the golden tulip lanterns of Saint Germaine
but she wails, “I lost my cat at the border!”

an angel has entered the empty carrier for animals
from the city’s fresco
and sleeps

The girl with the bullet in her stomach runs
up a hill
and sees herself with an ammonite embryo of the city
beneath her heart
The key to the city gates sheds its thousand-year-old rust
and it shines so brightly that she becomes afraid

The girl Zhenia with a bullet in her biography
runs to the Ukrainian forest
runs as if she is alive

Don’t go into that home
everything you didn’t have time to take
was like a ransom paid
for an incredibly fortunate life
for boisterous evenings and slow soft awakenings
for larger flower pots, for coffee on the sunny terrace
for the pines that still hold up the heavens
above charred ruins
You were still a little uncertain about whether you should take the old record player
and some of your favorite records
and mohair yarn that you bought on sale yesterday
But your small car was strained more and more by the resistance
As if it knew that in several hours it would become a riddled sieve
It is now tenderly rusting away somewhere on this side of spring
Don’t dwell on it either
with thoughts with texts with drawings
I cast a spell over you, leave them behind
Especially, the Home—
inside it, the lair of black foxes of grief
Rain pours over the skeleton of the piano
Old clothes, worn by shrapnel, still dream of fashionable outings
Dolls winter in string
nourished by coniferous milk
don’t pull a thread, don’t remember
The souls of objects
that weren’t selected
will overwhelm you, won’t let you leave

They say that sprouts germinated from the surviving vases
And that at night you can hear
cracklings of music coming from the basement

Now the only thing that you can do for her, Christ,
is not open the black envelope
Let her go
the windows will be replaced before Easter
just like that
A drowsy bee flew in and landed on the notebook
a quiz
on February 23

Lord, you have so many worries
the city of crematoriums shine
with a phosphorescent light
onto the complicit Vatican
A rosary of a humanitarian convoy
moves West across shaky bridges
saturated soil swells
It’s time to sow
Maybe you will at least close the sky

Who is there with him?
No one
a little jealous teacher
…The last one to touch him was probably the barber
Now you come forward
to identify him

You dreamed of a tall nuclear Easter bread
children running every which way
You couldn’t catch them
your voice broke

On the bed where the child slept
were just feathers
and charred clothes

Look, these poems are made of fragments
pulled from the ruins
Do with them as you wish
Lead her further away
from the black envelopes
Holy Immortal God

but his telephone came to life
from the envelope

Unfold and dive into me, to my very bone,
Feed me with clarity the boundaries of this fantasy game,
journey where no one has journeyed before, to the ending credits,
until dawn spills over like dark cider,
until we aren’t trapped in an insect’s likeness –
don’t stop, find out what I am made of.
As long as we haven’t decayed to precious dust and citations,
as long as we buzz to each other, like two autumn cicadas, –
label me, a leper, sing it, unsung
let firm bulbs of wonder in tight vases blossom
all over the room from your song,
let everything genitive, nominative, and unnamed – come out.
They say that at the end the very gates await us,
beyond which we are free…A little brahman conjures,
an enamel lotus swims in the sky, like a lamp…
A saber-toothed deer flies, and its large shadow
falls softly, like love, which you can’t let go of anymore,
on the spines of books, resembling a keyboard,
because the twilight’s music plays with us in the abyss of rye…
Kiss me there, where the earth is firmly sewn
to the sky, the soul to the body, winter to summer…
…And that which you will see then, leave it to burn.

Anna Malihon is an award-winning Ukrainian poet, and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals, included in several anthologies, and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets, the chapbookMemory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter. She is the translator or co-translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, Vasyl Makhno, and Yuliya Musakovska. Her translation of Anna Malihon’s Girl with a Bullet is forthcoming from World Poetry Books. She lives in Queens, New York where she founded and co-curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.

Talks with the Besieged: Documentary Poetry from Occupied Ukraine

August 21, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By ALEX AVERBUCH

Translated by OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK, MAX ROSOCHINSKY, and the author

Piece appears below in English and the original Russian and Ukrainian.

Translators’ Note

Alex Averbuch authored Talks with the Besieged on the basis of his engagement with group chats on Telegram and other public IM platforms by Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The present selection is excerpted from this larger work that explores the relentless and evolving nature of the occupation, capturing the initial bewilderment and disorientation experienced by those who stayed behind. These brief, fragmented exchanges reflect civilians navigating the chaos of war in real time. Oscillating between found poetry, a digital archive, and virtual testimony, the text presents the fears, anxieties, aspirations, and dreams of the community enduring liminality and existential uncertainty. In translating these dispatches, we’ve attempted to approximate the casual, matter-of-fact tone of participants, their poignant attempts to lighten the mood, encourage each other, and offer reassurance and consolation.While Telegram and many other IM platforms offer automatic capitalization for each new comment, we decided to use lowercase letters instead, capitalizing only toponyms and proper names. We have also removed the names of the original contributors, blurring the distinctions between them and obscuring where one utterance ends and another begins. We hope that these decisions help render the text as a continuous uninterrupted expression of hope and terror and create an impression of a living chorus, a droning and wailing unbroken human voice.

Translation: to and back

July 3, 2024 Poetry, Translation

By HALYNA KRUK
Translated by LADA KOLOMIYETS

Poem appears below in English and the original Ukranian.

Translator’s note

Since February 2022, the metaphorics of Halyna Kruk’s poetry have undergone transformation on the way to nearing the genre of testimony. Kruk explains in her speech at the poetry festival in Berlin in June 2022 that metaphors have lost their power in front of what is actually experienced (Kruk, Halyna. “Krieg ist keine Metapher.” Zeit Online, June 18, 2022). The voice of the diarist of wartime has become the most important feature of literary expression. In her Berlin speech—just as in the poem to and back, written in spring 2022—Kruk warns the prosperous western world against erecting an emotional wall between Ukraine and itself. While addressing the Western audience, she tries to explain a painful feeling of irreparable loss—in our souls, in our culture, science, economy, industry, society —of men and women, someone’s parents, someone’s children, who were killed by Russia: “War creates a gap between those who have experienced it and those who are far from it; with each passing day of the war, I see that it is more and more difficult to explain to people from the outside what we feel here, on the inside. … Poetry acquires very peculiar forms—a spontaneous prayer, a stingy testimony, a lament or even a curse to the enemy. These are not the forms of poetry to which modern European culture is accustomed, they are functional and ritualistic, too primeval in their emotional coloring, too subjective, too pathetic, and intolerant” (Kruk, “Krieg ist keine Metapher”; my translation).

In her poem to and back Kruk writes about the unfitting of war in the eyes of Western world, even if the words for war may be found by survivors and those who have experienced it. Incompatibility of war and peace, of poetry and war calls for the memory to work in place of creativity. The healing power of poetry—as a witness of war crimes in Ukraine—is encoded in Kruk’s poems, written in the spring and summer of 2022.

—Lada Kolomiyets

The August Story

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA
Translated from the Ukrainian by OLENA JENNINGS and YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA

If their history together hadn’t begun this way,
they both would have been left alone, each with their war.
August—hellish, the bathhouse filled with bodies.
She squeezes the familiar palm and comes to life again.
Everything that has happened and didn’t happen to them,
is established, set in stone, unforgettable,

April 2023 Poetry Feature

April 27, 2023 Poetry

April Is Poetry Month: New Poems By Our Contributors

MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN, DAVID LEHMAN, and YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA (translated by the author and OLENA JENNINGS)

Table of Contents:

Mark Anthony Cayanan

—Ecstasy Facsimile (These days I ask god…)

David Lehman

—The Remedy

—A Postcard from the Future

—Last Day in the City

Yuliya Musakovska (translated by the author and Olena Jennings)

—Angel of Maydan

—The Sorceress’ Oath

Is Poetry Possible at the Moment History Stirs: Poets of Ukraine

March 9, 2022 News, News and Events

I ask
Half-awake
Is poetry possible
At the moment history stirs
Once its steps
Reverberate through every heart?

— From “Can there be poetry after” by Anastasia Afanasieva, translated by Kevin Vaughn and Maria Khotimsky

With the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, we at The Common have been reflecting on the powerful words of many Ukrainian poets who have appeared in our pages. In recent years their work has been rooted in conflict, as the country struggled first with self-determination and later with the Russian annexation of Crimea and, since 2014, with a Russian-incited war in the East. This focus lends a feeling of prescience and timeliness to their work now, even though most of these poems are not new. We hope you’ll make time to read and reflect on the work of these poets, as we all keep Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in our thoughts.

On Halloween

November 4, 2020 Dispatches, Translation

By VASYL LOZYNSKY

Translated by the author and JESSICA ZYCHOWICZ

Hudson, NY

I feel greedy, I have a frog in my throat because of this
expensive beer. I start to ask around, like a detective,
and immediately get some info
from the writer sitting at our table nearby,
whom I got to know just now.
The house of Ashbery has likely mahogany doors facing
the square, probably where city hall is.
I don’t even think about visiting without letting
someone know first. I stop and read a few poems in a bookshop.
You won’t repeat the jokes, I say,
you’ll go around to all the apartments on Halloween
with pumpkins, like I used to do
in my childhood, but then the main thing was trick or treat,
not to force someone for an interview or a photograph.

September 2017 Poetry Feature

September 29, 2017 Poetry, Translation

This month The Common brings you a selection from the anthology WORDS FOR WAR, NEW POEMS FROM UKRAINE, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, forthcoming next month from Academic Studies Press.

The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.

ANASTASIA AFANASIEVA | “Can there be poetry after:”

BORYS HUMENYUK | “Our platoon commander is a strange fellow”

ALEKSANDR KABANOV | “He came first wearing a t-shirt inscribed ‘Je suis Christ,’”

KATERYNA KALYTKO | “April 6”

LYUDMYLA KHERSONSKA | “When a country of — overall — nice people”

SERHIY ZHADAN | “Third Year into the War”