Food for the Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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