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Translated with an introduction by Alexandra Büchler
‘One of 2024’s most outstanding achievements in Czech poetry.’ – Tvar
The Czech-Ukrainian poet Iryna Zahladko records their life-changing experience in a poetic language which alternates between an urgent diary record and a stylised account of disintegration and violence. ‘Above the collar bone a cover bubbles, alongside it, under my skin, I touch a plastic pipe – an underground tunnel full of people sleeping.’
In Make-up Tips for the Sick, Zahladko engages in the most intimate record of the body’s processes while undergoing treatment for cancer, tirelessly observing the experience of internal exile in a world where supposedly ‘nothing is happening’. While their poetry demands that these harsh realities be addressed, it also acknowledges that even here simple human desires exist, even here the taste of good food is important. Life goes on, even though time does not flow in war or illness, as the poet relates with a repeated, urgent refrain.
Alexandra Büchler is a literary curator, translator and editor and director of the Wales-based platform Literature Across Frontiers. She has some thirty publications to her name as editor and translator. Her most recent publications are anthologies of emerging European writers Zero Hours on the Boulevard and Ulysses’ Cat, and Dream of a Journey: Selected Poems by Kateřina Rudčenková, all from Parthian Books.