A Handful of Bees: Poems

by Dzvinia Orlowsky

Originally published in 1994 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, A Handful of Bees has been republished as a Classic Contemporary by Carnegie Mellon. The collection embarks with poems reflecting on the passing of Mrs. Orlowsky's father (to whom the book is dedicated). Orlowsky raises the tragedy of losing a parent to a universal plane that's both earnest and cathartic, where even simple belongings of the deceased are imbued with power and testimony. There is a thread of sadness that plaits its way through this volume. Even through the poems on life with immigrant parents, there is a stark, visible yearning. The world of home and the world outside and the conflict of the two to coexist. A situation that many Americans of any given ethnicity can immediately grasp. Imagery in A Handful of Bees is never random, but lucid, in the moment like hot glass forged into a sharp gem. A Handful of Bees is immediately personal, international, and, filtered through the prism of the heart, these poems come forth universally. Dzvinia Orlowsky films a screenplay for the intuition. In just this one volume of sixty-one pages, she undefeatedly answers as many life questions as she has conjured. With stealth, imparting the reader a sense of "being there" in the human condition. —Mike Amado / Ibbetson Update /2008/ Somerville, Massachusetts

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

About the author

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books, and an author of six poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her translation from the Ukrainian of Alexander Dovzhenko’s novella, The Enchanted Desna, was published by House Between Water Press in 2006, and in 2014, Dialogos published Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish poet Mieczslaw Jastrun for which she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.