About the Author

Alla Vilnyanskaya was born in the Ukraine and raised in the U.S. She came to Philadelphia in 1989 with her parents. She holds an MA from Miami University and an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been published in multiple online and print journals including Zaum, Poetry International, Saint Ann’s Review and Boog City. She is an alumna of The Home School and has won several teaching fellowships and other awards from Miami University and Columbia University.

Reviews

“Alla Vilnyansky writes with a compelling sense of immediacy, a passion for delivering the reader to a dramatic moment. Yet, it’s her sense of time and the larger world’s sadness that we feel in these intense, driven poems.”

—Jan Beatty, author of The Body Wars

“Few poets have been as fearless in confronting violence and pain as Alla Vilnyanskaya. Void includes love poems and poems that find the marvelous in the ordinary as they render memories of a “house with no rules,” or describe a chance encounter with a boy bouncing a tennis ball in a country club. Like Reznikoff’s early poems, Vilnyanskaya’s poems will stay with you for a long time.”

—Keith Tuma, author of On Leave

“Void is Vilnyanskaya’s bleak journey through the heart-wrecked flotsam of a different life that might have made all the difference.”

—Tyrone Williams, author of stilettos in a rifle range

“The poems in Void are bold and beautiful, dealing with ideas of violence both viscerally and as a type of idea, or abstraction. They use frightening imagery to convey the terror a person can feel being in a body, both what it can do and can be done to it.”

—Dorothea Lasky, author of Milk

“Alla Vilnyanskaya writes in what seems the calm expectation of unfolding horrors. Complemented by her translations of a sister Ukrainian poet into parallel versions of their parallel poetical worlds, this volume constitutes a long-overdue debut by an uncompromising, singular-voiced younger poet.”

—David Schloss, author of Reports from Babylon and Beyond