A passionate intensity moves through the subjective, intimate voice of the poems of Natalka Bilotserkivets. Through translation, Subterranean Fire continues their mysterious pilgrimage to their second lives. From one of the true inheritors — touchstones like Anna Akhmatova, Gabriela Mistral, and Louise Bogan — the poems of Bilotserkivets inhabit us as they include us in their transcendent borderland.

– American poet James Brasfield

With great depths of feeling, Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poetry guides us into that uncharted territory where word meets heart. The poems, spare and often questioning, redeem that land between what is most difficult to grasp and most difficult to forget.

– Dzvinia Orlowsky, American poet and translator

Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poetry …is characterized by tight form and elegiac feelings … this reader was impressed by the liquid cascade of alliterations in her … poems.

– Professor Andrew Wachtel

…contemporary Ukrainian literature has been enriched by the unique pearl of [Natalka Bilotserkivets’s] intellectual and lyrical poetry.

– Ukrainian prose writer, poet, and essayist Kost Moskalets

I am certain that this first-rate modern Ukrainian poet could become a star of world lyric poetry…

– Ukrainian poet and prose writer Ludmyla Taran

James Brasfield

Books

Book translations