[10/09/25] Malihon, Anna / Jennings, Olena (tr.): Girl With a Bullet

World Poetry, paperback

Publication Date: October 9, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Ukrainian poet Anna Malihon’s English-language debut gathers daring, resilient, open-eyed poems written before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion. The difficult fates voiced by the protagonists of Malihon’s poems intertwine with her own experience, weaving an alarming but beautiful world where the young grow old and love is met with war. This world, at first shocking, holds the reader in suspension, compelling a desire to rethink and reread. With deft allegory and startling metaphor, Malihon crafts a poetry that seeks to influence the course of events, to reroute history.

"Anna Malihon’s poems about life during wartime are harrowing, emotionally devastating, yet full of calm ironies: Ukraine’s evacuated and bombed cities—'from which children come instead of letters / come in long heavy envelopes'—are now 'so deserted there’s no one to harm you.' Malihon is somehow always intimate, apparently personal, even while documenting the war in a circumspect manner, from the point of view of a variety of personae. A disembodied voice from the trenches wearily shoos away a puppy, declaring, 'People are death to people, don't get used to them.' Yet these poems remain full of vividly evoked moments of family life and joyful time spent with lovers, “boisterous evenings and slow soft awakenings,' even if so much has been left behind, 'like a ransom paid / for an incredibly fortunate life.' Presented in Olena Jennings’s seamless translation, Girl with a Bullet is one of the most important books of the year, a gift to Anglophone readers." —JOHN HENNESSY

"Malihon writes in poetic chords that evoke folk tales as well as the details of war wounds and displacement. The varied personas of her poems move far away and morph, pouring into other vessels in her surrealistic narration. She tells us about Ukrainian girls and women running 'without saying goodbye / through the news, the noble mold of solemn speeches / through history, geography.” This is existence in fragmented stories between life and death, but there is also a voice insisting on “how tenderness is born in your transportable body.' Olena Jennings’s translation is sensitive and specific. A beautiful collection." —OLGA LIVSHIN