An International Anthology for Ukraine

….AND BLUE WILL RISE OVER YELLOW

And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow is a project conceived and created by poet John Bradley and KGP Poetry Editor Tate Lewis-Carroll. This beautiful 140-page anthology features mostly Ukrainian poets. Over 70 poets and a dozen translators donated literary art to this project. Proceeds from the sale of this volume will be used to support the refugees (mostly women and children) who were displaced by the Russian invasion. Here’s one of my favorite shorter poems from this collection.

“When bullets flew across the garden”

when bullets flew across the garden,
they swung two branches aside,
flew past our very hearts
and hit two birds.
Which fell to the ground
as white flowers…
how can i not love you?
 
   – Vitaliy Bilozir
      (translated from the Ukrainian by Elena Mordovina and Tatiana Retivov)

And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine, edited by John Bradley, is a must for our troubled world. Each poem here has risen out of need and feeling, acknowledgement and daring, a choice of weapons. Yes, art can work that way: giving shared space to each unique voice, these tropes of humanity bare the realities of war, as well as lived moments of life and death. Here, each poem coaxes us to see into, to feel, to know, as witnesses—moments of action rendered through contemplation—war and history. Tender and bold, we witness the gore of battle from the periphery, through crafted cadences and experimental shapes and sounds woven in this poignant collection.
    –Yusef Komunyakaa, 2021 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award

And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow is an incredible book—so much terror in these pages, and yet so much delight of language, imagery, so much music of the unsaid, so much emotion of tears witheld, of screams swallowed, of bullets becoming periods, punctuation marks. It is an incredible book because it shows us that human spirit survives, in the midst of bombardments, facing death, there is a voice that cannot be taken away, a voice that joins the chorus of other voices, across the globe. To these poets, and these translators, my endless gratitude.
    –Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic

You can purchase the collection here.

https://www.kallistogaiapress.org/product/blue-will-rise-over-yellow-an-international-poetry-anthology-for-ukraine/

Proceeds go to support  Ukrainian refugees displace by Russian invasion.


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