Spring 2026 Book Club: Friday, April 17th: A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails By Halyna Kruk

This spring CGES is pleased to co-host our book club with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The selected titles for this semester explore themes of contested memory surrounding histories of violence and conquest across Europe. 

We hope you will join us on Friday,April 17th from 4:00 - 5:30pm, 710 Social Sciences to discuss a special collection of poetry, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails By Halyna Kruk 

A finalist for the the Griffin Poetry Prize, and translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine. These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine’s most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. Leading readers into the world’s darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection. Naming serves as a shield, albeit a wooden one. The paradox is that after the bullets have been fired and the missiles landed, the wooden shield, the printed book, reconstitutes itself.