#Dzvinia Orlowsky

[thepoetrycurator]

Excerpt from the poem "We'll Not Die in Paris" by Natalka Bilotserkivets, translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky.

From IN THE HOUR OF WAR: POETRY FROM UKRAINE edited by Carolyn Forche and Ilya Kaminsky.

[sixtyfivehundredinvisiblebirds]

what I read in 2022

2022 We Ride Upon Sticks- Quan Barry How to Not Be Afraid of Everything- Jane Wong Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories- Hilma Wolitzer The Rabbit Hutch- Tess Gunty The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams- Jonathan Ned Katz AND Lesbian Love- Eve Adams (in same volume) Thistlefoot- GennaRose Nethercott Bluest Nude- Ama Codjoe The Master Letters- Lucy Brock-Broido (reread) Family Lexicon- Natalia Ginzburg (tr. Jenny McPhee) The Whole Story- Ali Smith The Rupture Tense- Jenny Xie Bad Rabbi: And other strange but true stories from the Yiddish press- Eddie Portnoy A Tale for the Time Being- Ruth Ozeki Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands- Kate Beaton Wandering Stars- Sholem Aleichem (tr. Aliza Shevrin)   Moldy Strawberries- Caio Fernando Abreu (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato) Sarahland- Sam Cohen Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency- Chen Chen Elephant- Soren Stockman Craft in the Real World- Matthew Salesses Life of the Garment- Deborah Gorlin Olio- Tyehimba Jess In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen- Devin Kelly The Wild Fox of Yemen- Threa Almontaser Song- Brigit Pegeen Kelly Qorbanot- Alisha Kaplan w/ art by Tobi Kahn Gold that Frames the Mirror- Brandon Melendez Foreign Bodies- Kimiko Hahn A Little Devil in America- Hanif Abdurraqib Muscle Memory- Kyle Carrero Lopez not without small joys- Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah Too Bright To See & Alma- Linda Gregg Borne- Jeff VanderMeer Harvard Square- André Aciman What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat- Aubrey Gordon The City We Became- N.K. Jemison Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints- Joan Acocella Vladimir-Julia May Jonas Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch- Rivka Galchen Lessons in Being Tender-Headed- Janae Johnson Against Heaven- Kemi Alabi How The Word Is Passed- Clint Smith Earth Room- Rachel Mannheimer True Biz- Sara Nović Motherhood- Sheila Heti The Fire Next Time- James Baldwin Diary of a lonely girl or the battle against free love- Miriam Karpilove tr. Jessica Kirzane Mezzanine- Matthew Olzmann Customs- Solmaz Sharif Edge of House- Dzvinia Orlowsky Only as the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems- Dorianne Laux DMZ Colony- Don Mee Choi Stay Safe- Emma Hine Spring Tides- Jacques Poulin, trn. Shira Fleishman (reread) No One Is Talking About This- Patricia Lockwood Unaccompanied- Javier Zamora Where I Was From- Joan Didion Air Raid- Polina Barskova tr. Valtzina Mort Dispatch- Cam Awkward-Rich Bury It- sam sax A Cruelty Special to Our Species- Emily Jungmin Yoon Homie- Danez Smith Dreaming of You- Melissa Lozada-Oliva

[candacemariehughes]

dvz church: the enchanted desna by dzvinia orlowsky card. on. paid.

[allyourprettywords]

“Let the Dead Bury the Dead,” Dzvinia Orlowsky

Surely she would want to hear one final song, something from the Carpathians, something folkloric about flying geese or curly hair, just to calm her nerves before he laid her to rest. Or she might ask for a glass of chilled white wine, even though he never quite learned how to pour it well, forgetting to twist the bottle, or how to sip it, gazing into her eyes. He would have to find his domino cuff links, but first he would have to find his arms. He hadn't needed them for so long. The wind shushed through where his ribs once curled, a fat robin lodged itself in the invisible branches that spread where a human heart once beat. He'd remember not to wear his Adidas maroon three-stripe sweat suit, the one that made him sweat only if she saw him and grew angry. This is not the way to seduce me, her dark stormy eyes would reprimand. Should he bring a shovel? Could he bear to toss dirt on her remembering that he didn't particularly like it, the sound like heavy intermittent rain drumming on the roof of his casket, his friends staring into the burial vault, wondering what it would be like down there instead. Would she lie down quietly? He'd remember to reserve the moon. He'd ask a distracted God not to sweep too close to the stars. The tall grass would sway in the night breeze as if nothing had changed. Maybe he wouldn't need to bring his guitar, just his hands, if, he could remember where he last placed them. He hoped not to disappoint her with his cup of cracked black walnuts and a blushed apple unwrapped from a white lapel handkerchief, luring her into the next world. Any way, she was still very much alive. Night after night she stood in front of the bathroom mirror brushing back her filaments of fine hair. Why couldn't he see her there—spraying clouds of Paris Eau de Toilette in large continuous circles onto her white gauze nightgown, hear her reticent sigh.

[sakurabreeze]

Feather

A feather, its bird, the color red. All three, like their silence, belong to this day. Inside this house, at the sink, a drop of water immense as sky, immense as itself. Long shadows stretch across the back yard, cut borders into afternoon-long provinces, meager grasses. Something passed here long before I stepped into light. A single feather, its lost script. Which world, trembling, did it finally choose?

Dzvinia Orlowsky, “Feather,” The American Poetry Review (vol. 28, no. 4, July/August 1999)

[kitchen-light]

I want to be who I won't be. I want to become who I'm already not. I want to know how to hear - to forget how a knife carves out your name.

Natalka Bilotserkivets, from her poem ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, from “Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow | Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets”, translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky (Lost Horse Press, 2021)

[banji-effect]

Swallows

a last attempt to fly off somewhere from this coop from this stable from this bedroom where the urgent sweet smells of an animal’s nest hang

there to there—to heavens touched where electrical wires are like a pedestal and the fiery strokes of a rainbow the unsettled comforts of a poor life

like black mittens from our fingers like the black and white keys of a piano like festival fireworks at night they fly from their native nest

they’re already there—invisible like the endless sound of the final abyss so fearless and so cold the solitary flights of our lives

Natalka Bilotserkivets, translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky

[ruknowhere]

Swallows

a last attempt to fly off somewhere

from this coop from this stable from

this bedroom where the urgent sweet

smells of an animal’s nest hang

there to there—to heavens touched

where electrical wires are like a pedestal

and the fiery strokes of a rainbow

the unsettled comforts of a poor life

like black mittens from our fingers

like the black and white keys of a piano

like festival fireworks at night

they fly from their native nest

they’re already there—invisible

like the endless sound of the final abyss

so fearless and so cold

the solitary flights of our lives

-Natalka Bilotserkivets

[arablit]

On the Translation of NTA-shortlisted 'Exhausted on the Cross'

On the Translation of NTA-shortlisted ‘Exhausted on the Cross’

The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced yesterday that Najwan Darwish and Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s Exhausted on the Cross was one of the four-book shortlist for their poetry prize, alongside works by Mandelstam (tr. Peter France), Dante (tr. D. M. Black), and atalka Bilotserkivets (tr. Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky). In celebration of this shortlisting, we re-run our…

[adryansky]

Voices of Poetry at the Mount!

Voices of Poetry at the Mount!

Voices of Poetry at the Mount with Antoinette Brim-Bell, Amy Dryansky, Jennifer Franklin, Gloria Monaghan, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Anthony Walton & host Neil Silverblatt Outside, in the beautiful Berks, with six poets reading their work–what could be better? (Yeah, one of those poets is me.) Hope to see you there! Sunday, June 5, 2022, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PMThe Mount2 Plunkett StreetLenox, Massachusetts…

[upstreamtheater]

Tonight! “Beyond the Scorched Mountain”

Please join us for an evening of music and poetry from Ukraine and elsewhere! Free Admission, masks required

International Institute

3401 Arsenal St, St. Louis, MO 63118

(see map below for parking)

Wednesday May 11 8 PM

Photo by Ricardo Frantz on Unsplash  

The evening features live music by Farshid Soltanshahi and includes poems by Dzvinia Orlowsky, Oksana Maksymchuk, Olga Livshin, Serhiy Zhadan, Hafez, Ilya Abu Madi and Yehuda Amichai as read by Peter Mayer, Caitlin Mickey, Kathleen Sitzer, Jeff Cummings, Mona Sabau, Farshid Soltanshahi and Philip Boehm. Reception to follow (ok to remove mask while drinking).                               

back to upstreamtheater.org

[finishinglinepress]

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Unsymmetrical Body by Jennifer R. Edwards

TO ORDER GO TO:

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/unsymmetrical-body-by-jennifer-r-edwards/

Jennifer R. Edwards, MS, CCC-SLP grew up in central Vermont and attended the University of Vermont. She’s a speech-language pathologist and writer residing in Concord, NH with her family. Her Pushcart Prize (XLIV) nominated poetry appears online and in Portrait of New England, The Ekphrastic Review, Headline Poetry and Press, Lucky Jefferson, FreezeRay Poetry, 4linesart.com, COVID Spring: Granite State Pandemic Poems (Hobblebush Books, 2020), Literary Mama, The Racket, Snapdragon: Journal of Art and Healing and was honorably mentioned for the 2020 NEPC Amy Lowell Prize (selected by Dzvinia Orlowsky). She was a 2021 Thomas Lux Poetry Fellow at Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She currently curates for Button Poetry. She works tirelessly to empower others with communication skills, literacy, and strong voices for telling their own stories. Instagram Jenedwards8, Twitter @Jennife00420145.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Unsymmetrical Body by Jennifer R. Edwards

Rated 5.00out of 5 based on 2customer ratings

The poems of Jennifer R. Edwards often draw on memory, yet their freshness on the page strikes me over and over again. She takes the raw materials of past and present family life and changes them over time into the rich and fertile ground of true art, surprising us with the sharpness of her observations, and the much-needed humility of always trying to be “a heart beating the world.”

–James Crews, Poet and Editor of The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection & Joy

Jennifer R. Edwards is a poet that writes from the deep dissonances of the heart and mind trusting the wisdom of the poet’s impulse. Relationships and objects undergo a defamiliarization that bear truths of personal connection: a father’s love remembered in grapefruit, a grandmother and her love of professional wrestling, Sun-In and a parent’s planning the life of a daughter–no connection is unexplored. Edwards is a poet who shows us the deliberate and compassionate treatment of her various subjects and moves me with the way these poems of various forms fold memory after association into a heart’s awakening. Unsymmetrical Body is a collection of colossal stamina—when you read, you will certainly learn how the tender survive the harsh truths of this world in grace.

–Rajiv Mohabir, Author of CUTLISH (Four Way Books 2021), ANTIMAN(Winner of the 2021 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing) and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya Press 2019)

Jen Edwards, in her book Unsymmetrical Body, writes using a favorite theme of mine: Making the Private Public. In these poems we find her son blowing bubbles during his bath, an Easter without the kids, dealing with an ex-husband, her dad eating a grapefruit, and so much more. These are poems filled with human dignity and human failings from a promising young New Hampshire poet we are sure to hear more about in the future.

–Jimmy Pappas, Rattle chapbook prize winning author of Falling off the Empire State Building.

“Pink thumbs of strawberries”, “toes as tiny as pebbles”, “the sexy suck of cash in slots”— with words like these poet Jennifer Edwards entices readers into her new poetry collection, Unsymmetrical Body: Poems.

With such language and strong images, she eases us into the many sides of being human. We feel the push-pull of relationships, heartbreak of divorce, befuddlement over how others think, the wisdom of learning to open… and more.

What I find most compelling about the collection is how understated, yet moving, the poems are. Jen’s precise word choice and well-crafted lines always leave the reader with inklings

that something else is going on within the poem—“Mother was always reaching”, “held her daughter up as one might clutch shiny fruit despite starvation”, “all living borrowed on family time”.

Words, indirectly stated, tease the reader into re-reading lines to suck marrow out of their meaning. Be prepared to be lured in.

–Barbara Bald is a retired teacher and educational consultant. She worked at the Frost Place in Franconia NH and served on the Board of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Her poems have been published in many anthologies and journals. She has two poetry collections: Drive-Through Window and Other Voices/Other Lives and a chapbook Running on Empty.

Please share/please repost [PROMO]#flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry

[kitchen-light]

Yesterday he was reading and drawing, today he played a little basketball, the clarinet. Hundreds of ordinary matters have bored him a little. Most often he thinks about barefoot wanderings. The wind drills a whistle tunnel in the cosmic blue.

Natalka Bilotserkivets, from her poem ‘Herbarium’, from “Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorry | Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets”, translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, Lost Horse Press, 2021

[bibliomancyoracle]

Laughter,  isn’t it the best medicine? Yes, keep laughing.

  *

  from "Infusion"by Dzvinia Orlowsky

[kitchen-light]

Natalka Bilotserkivets, her poem “February”, translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, from her collection “Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow”, Lost Horse Press, 2021

[finishinglinepress]

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Between the Hours by Barbara Siegel Carlson

TO ORDER GO TO: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/between-the-hours-by-barbara-siegel-carlson/

RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY

Between the Hours is a collection of poems, some in prose form, that meditate on the paradoxical nature of time. Using spare language to evoke “a mystery inside the clear day,” each poem reveals a glimpse of a liminal space unseen and most often overlooked when we are focused on daily concerns. Beginning with “Cloud 0,” the collection traces through lost hours, darkness, wind, sleep, snow to gather a sense of what passes through. The word “clear” appears many times in this chapbook that opens “a hand in a dream/that doesn’t let go.” The imagery, often from the natural world, conjures memories and dreams as well as history, science, philosophy and spirituality transforming the moment into one of eternity.

Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of 2 books of poetry Once in Every Language and Fire Road, co-translator of 2 books of poems by Srečko Kosovel and co-editor of A Bridge of Voices. She lives in Carver, Massachusetts.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Between the Hours by Barbara Siegel Carlson

Spare language, compressed emotion—the power of the unsaid balanced against the exactitude of what is expressed—allow Barbara Siegel Carlson’s new poems to take on significant weight with each word, each jagged edge, shimmering with multiple meanings. Many of these poems reside in a moment of eternal brevity, in silent rooms, after the light has left, and in the stillness between sleeping and the dead/the flying and the feather that lies on the ground. Fragmented dreamscapes examine what remains, what feels adequate in disassembling and reconstructing the past. Between the Hours is a stunningly beautiful book.

–DZVINIA ORLOWSKY, author of Bad Harvest

Between the Hours by Barbara Siegel Carlson is an alluring collection of powerfully contemplative poems and prose poems that explore timeless interstices, imagining and inhabiting the spaces between moments, the pauses between present, past and future. Here the poet can see into the dark and brilliant heart of things, the paradoxical infinities found in windy nights, sleep, bones, a bog before dawn, remembered houses with undiscovered rooms, where a birthday is “a bookmark in a book without words” and the light of late winter is “deep in our bones, where we first sprouted / from the light.” Jack Gilbert, W. S. Merwin and Tu Fu, Heraclitus, the astronomer Olbers, Joan of Arc, Billie Holiday, and Chekhov emerge like apparitions during these luminous lyrical excursions through the deep distance between our bodies and the objects and spaces that surround us. These texts are intimate with light and darkness, brilliant life and easeful death, and create a home in “the stillness / of rooms after the light has left / and shadows have settled / the same inside as out.”

–STEPHAN DELBOS, Poet Laureate of Plymouth MA. and author of Small Talk

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