What do animals experience in a world which was not created for them? Can they inhabit our language in the same way they inhabit cities? Their situation is more similar to those of humans than we usually care to admit.

Poetry

The stories of a jackdaw from the Prague underground, bats in Barcelona, or flowers evacuated ahead of the war in Ukraine. The life of a pheasant, usually hidden from human view, with its creative and political acts. The testimonies of kestrels, rats, magpies, ragwort and other inhabitants of the world, united by the experience of passing through an alien environment. This, roughly speaking, is how we might understand the work of Marie Iljašenko, who invites animals into her poems and lets them speak through their own habits. She shares her words with them, even though, in a certain sense, it is still her own voice. And cities are similar in this respect. In notes from Barcelona, Cork, Kyiv, Prague and Tokyo, the author thematizes the experience of migration and reflects on the relationship between language, identity, the body and place. In so doing, she shows that the experience and sensitivity of people and animals can meet in the space of language—just as they do in the space of cities—amid constant concealment and doubt, yet with the ever-present possibility of compassion.

Marie Iljašenko (1983) was born in Kyiv into a Ukrainian–Polish–Czech family. In 1992, she and her parents moved to the Broumov region. To date she has published the poetry collections Osip Heads South (Host, 2014), St. Outdoor (Host, 2019), and Wild Urban Stories (Host, 2025). Her poems have been translated into many languages and nominated for several awards. She is the recipient of the Tom Stoppard Prize for the best essay written in Czech (2023). She works as a publishing editor and translates from Polish and Ukrainian. She lives in Prague with her husband Josef and two cats, Ferenc and Luna.