Anna Malihon - Girl with a Bullet
Anna Malihon
Girl with a Bullet
Translated from Ukrainian by
OLENA JENNINGS
Bilingual Edition
September 25, 2025
BIOS
ANNA MALIHON is an award-winning Ukrainian poet, and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals, included in several anthologies, and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.
OLENA JENNINGS is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press), the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter (Cervena Barva Press). She is the translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, and Vasyl Makhno. Her translation of Yuliya Musakovska's The God of Freedom was released in 2024 from Arrowsmith Press. She lives in Queens, New York where she founded and curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.
Anna Malihon
Girl with a Bullet
Translated from Ukrainian by
OLENA JENNINGS
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’ seamless translation, Girl with a Bullet is one of the most important books of the year, a gift to Anglophone readers.” —John Hennessy
BIOS
ANNA MALIHON is an award-winning Ukrainian poet, and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals, included in several anthologies, and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.
OLENA JENNINGS is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press), the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter (Cervena Barva Press). She is the translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, and Vasyl Makhno. Her translation of Yuliya Musakovska's The God of Freedom was released in 2024 from Arrowsmith Press. She lives in Queens, New York where she founded and curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.
Bilingual Edition
September 25, 2025
