UCSD Professor Amelia M. Glaser will read from Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk’s A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails Olga Livshin will read from Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska’s Today is a Different War.
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. Leading readers into the world’s darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection. 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. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, and she has translated from several languages into Ukrainian. She has 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 Literary Borderlands (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.
Admission/Cost: FREE
Location:
D. G. Wills Books
7461 Girard Ave.
San Diego, CA
Saturday, April 1 - 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM