Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters

Born out of the pain and loss of a fragmented present, Iya Kiva’s poetry, collected in English translation in Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters, stitches memories of the past into Ukraine’s new reality. Since war broke out in her native Donetsk in 2014, she has become a prominent voice of Ukraine’s internally displaced citizens, finding new metaphors to express the ongoing uncertainties of this time. Kiva first began publishing in her native Russian but, since the Donbas war, she has shifted to writing in Ukrainian. Her poems also reflect her mixed Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish background and contribute to defining contemporary Ukraine-a culturally and linguistically diverse sovereign country. As Ukraine struggles for its existence, Kiva offers lyric poems that acknowledge the deep trauma of war while radiating love and hope.

Author Biography

Iya Kiva is an award-winning poet, translator, and journalist from Donetsk, now living in Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Further from Heaven and The First Page of Winter. Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and an award-winning translator. She is author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands and has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Quarterly, and Times Literary Supplement. Her translations have been featured on LitHub and on NPR’s The World. Yuliya Ilchuk is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of Nikolai Gogol. Her translations of Iya Kiva have been featured widely in the media, including on LitHub and on NPR’s “The World.”