Only the forest ahead

The book includes poems written from August 2020 to February 2023.

"...life stands above us, / a child-angel / from the overturned / boat of love" - perhaps the most accurate quote from Olga Zlotnikova's new poetry book, a kind of introduction to the poet's artistic world. Its distinctive feature is that Olga organically combines the systems of two languages - Russian and Belarusian, each of which brings to her poetry a constellation of images, the sound of a poetic line, and a unique intonation. 

In the new book, its basis is a broken rhythm, fragments of phrases with many pauses, sound gaps that leave space for reflection. The poems convey the experience of a person who went through August 2020, which is why biblical imagery is presented in gloomy colors, and hope is problematized so as not to write "the absent", the artistic world is permeated by the leitmotifs of silence, the impossibility of shouting, the inability to break through the wall of emptiness, the forced deprivation of sound. And at the same time, this is not a commentary on reality. More precisely, more than a commentary, because we are talking about the human fate, its trembling part - the heart. Therefore, the fate is ahead.

Olga Zlotnikova Born in 1987 in Minsk. Studied at the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts. Poems have been published in the "Anthology of Modern Belarusian Verlibre", "Anthology of Poets. Selected by Valzhyna Mort", paper and online publications: "Minsk School", "Homo Legens", "New Journal", "Vestnik RHD", "Literratura", "Etazhi" and others. Author of the books of poems "Pastva" (2016) and "Radogoshchensky Dnevnik" (2018). Lives in Minsk.