Abstract

In Halyna Kruk’s 2023 bilingual collection of poems, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, words and images function simultaneously as metaphors and as signs that point to a real world that itself operates on more than one level. As Kruk’s particularly complicated metaphoric practice sets the material world reverberating with multiple levels of meaning, the effect is a de-centering of the human. In “No Milk, No Love” (2022) Asia Bazdyrieva writes of the historical “resourcification” of Ukraine and Ukrainians that justifies the “slow violence and environmental damage” of the war that Kruk’s poetry also describes. Kruk’s response in this collection of poems is to return agency to Ukrainian humans and non-humans alike as two parts of a single whole.