Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a poet of both British and Ukrainian heritage. Her debut pamphlet Ways of Healing was a winner of the New Poets Prize. Shevchenko Knight has an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London and is based in York. She is a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award.
Gathering the tribes of the living and the dead, wooing the ghosts
of history and the present, these are compelling testimonies in
defence of dream (which is to say memory) against death (which is
to say oblivion); a book of poems (which is to say spells) that
insist, despite all the evidence, that language can still be a
crystal ball through which we can see all our departed loves. Here
history comes alive, which is to say it comes to hurt us again. A
beautiful, necessary book
*Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic*
Opening Food for the Dead, I was not prepared for the sheer force
of its telling: in poem after poem about grandmothers, unendurable
hunger and the glorious intransigence of survival, Shevchenko
Knight generates an irresistible momentum that carries the reader
into a world at once familiar and strange, where an improbable
beauty and nobility of spirit coexist with routine corruption,
needless misery and the casual brutality of totalitarianism
*John Burnside, author of Black Cat Bone*
Food for the Dead will break your heart and feed your soul. Every
line holds the truth, the collective memories of Ukraine beyond
history books and news headlines. I have been waiting for poems
like this for years – every one of them a masterpiece
*Olia Hercules, author of Mamushka*
These poems are hungry, burning, outraged and tender; they will
make your mouth water while simultaneously hollowing your bones. An
astonishing, lacerating, unforgettable debut, full of acutely
evocative poems of food and famine in Ukraine, and of an
adolescence lived in the shadow of trauma and extreme hunger. These
are poems of deep beauty, furious survival, and abiding familial
love
*Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron*
Simply radiating... The writing filled me with a longing for home I
had concealed within my inner chambers
*Eric Ngalle Charles, author of I, Eric Ngalle*
This extraordinary, beautiful book combines the personal and the
political: Ukraine’s tragic past and bloody present providing the
backdrop to poems about grandparents, hunger, childhood, and
collective memory – all of them poignant and pitch-perfect
*Luke Harding, author of Invasion*
These poems break an opening through into a space and time that is
both vast – from Soviet famine to present-day invasion, from
England to Donetsk - and intimate: kitchen work, coal dust,
pickles. With great clarity, Shevchenko Knight evokes a Ukraine
where the very food is haunted by memories of mass hunger, where
for her grandparents it is hope, defiance, love, simply to be and
to do
*James Meek, author of The People's Act of Love*
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