Charlotte Shevchenko Knight

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

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

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 &ndash; every one of them a masterpiece

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

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&rsquo;s tragic past and bloody present providing the backdrop to poems about grandparents, hunger, childhood, and collective memory &ndash; all of them poignant and pitch-perfect

These poems break an opening through into a space and time that is both vast &ndash; 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

**WINNER OF AN ERIC GREGORY AWARD** 
 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 FORWARD PRIZE - FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION* 
 
This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism 
 
'A beautiful, necessary book' 
ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic 
 
'Every poem is a masterpiece' 
OLIA HERCULES, author of Mamushka 
 
With this searingly powerful first collection, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within a wider and more accurate historical context. 
 
Central to this book is ‘a timeline of hunger’, a lyric sequence which examines the legacy of the Holodomor (‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian) – Stalin’s man-made famine of the 1930s. This long poem opens in Kyiv in 2021 – ‘brief visitations / of appetite / I devour / beetroot / its juices / running / down my lips / blood / of the past’ – and closes in Donetsk in 1929: ‘we burst the balloon / skin of tomatoes / between our teeth / seeds running down chins / like confetti / & we already know / every meal / should be celebrated.’ Through the poet’s sensitive approach to the historical, moving from that genocide of the early 1930s, then on through the Second World War, the Chornobyl disaster, to modern-day invaded Ukraine, we understand that within their ‘bones Holodomor / lives on’. 
 
Both a howl of anguish and an eloquent counter-song against totalitarianism, this is a book about invasion, war, destruction and death, but also about the bonds of humanity, family and a history of oppression – about staying alive while always hungry.

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight

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