Window without glass

A window without glass is something that saddens and surprises. It forces you to stop moving and thinking, to touch the painful image that appears on the cover in the form of the title and accompanies you on your journey through the pages. For Kasia Iofe, a Belarusian poet, translator, and psychotherapist, the book has become a place of self-reflection and contact with the reader.

The appeal to him is made beyond borders, the first of which is linguistic. The book contains poems in Belarusian, Russian, Polish, some works mention Ukrainian, Yiddish.

But "beyond borders" is not only through language and even geography. It's a matter of mental distance, which is also overcome: the book was created in conditions of relocation, taking into account the experience of 2020, extremely tragic, but not destructive. This is evidenced by the figurative system, where hypernaturalistic metaphors, like dislocated joints, are healed by natural elements, combining the natural and the social, and the phonetics of lines built on the collision of sounds, repetitions, and authorial neologisms with pieces of meaning. And beyond all this is the figure of the lyrical heroine, who fundamentally does not separate herself from the artistic universe with its fragile hope, which can exist only next to "white, red, white pain, expectation, pain."

Kasia Iofe (Katsiya Nowinski, formerly Kovalyonak-Glukhovskaya and Glukhovskaya by passport) is a Belarusian poet, psychotherapist, translator. Born on June 2, 1995 in Minsk. Appears in print since 2009 with prose publications in the journal "Dzeyaslov". Member of the Belarusian PEN Center since 2021. After the 2020 protests, she had to leave Belarus, and since the fall of 2020 she has been living in Krakow. Founder of the festivals "Culture in Exile" ("Culture in Emigration") at the Villa Decius, "Winter in Belarusian", "Grandfathers' Week", one of the main organizers of the Letucień Picnic. Since 2023, founder and chairwoman of the Belarusian society "Krok", which is engaged in the preservation and development of Belarusian culture.