The eyes all over Istanbul, the Late May – Remembering Childhood. How happy you made me, how vast your world is, resigned, stubborn, and beautiful.

Natalya Sukhonos is a poet of precision and empathy. Reading A  Stranger Home, one is staggered by the preponderance of both joy  and pain in the poet’s life, of which her work is a seamless extension.  With roots in Ukraine and a home life in Brooklyn, Sukhonos fluently  navigates languages, cultures, and landscapes, offering a poetic vision  of a world that is sprawling, yet intimate. These poems are momentous  in the Keatsian tradition, engaging personal and historical tragedy  while daring us to see the perseverant beauty in things.

The color gold gleams and glistens throughout this glorious new book  of poems by Natalya Sukhonos. We see it in her vivid evocations of  Ukrainian food, of “golden/rings of fried potatoes, pearly thin slices  of bacon/the deep orange/sunset of borscht”; of camouflage jasper gemstone, with its “round lunar surface, burgundy grey/mottled with  gold”; of dawn, which appears “like gold dust on concrete.”

But Sukhonos is too aware of the dark history of her native Odessa and her own  personal losses to paint these scenes as the remnants of a Golden Age.  The bright images of food haunt the mind of a man starving amid Stalin’s genocide, and jasper is the birthstone of the mother the poet is  mourning. Yet a redemptive light pours through the latter pages of the book, as Sukhonos celebrates the birth of two daughters. A Stranger Home is a beautifully grounded book of poetry.

As poet Natalya Sukhonos writes, “All books, all authors have a flavor,  a taste….” Her own work is sweet with “the gift of nourishment” between  mother and daughter and often intriguingly redolent of the “salted olive  oil and scallions” of her native Odessa, Ukraine. “A Stranger Home”  makes a welcoming new home for a trove of human wanderings and wonderings. 

“[W]hat’s remembering to you now?” asks one poem in Natalya Sukhonos’s sharp and timely collection. These are lyric poems of crucial  attention, of efforts to keep alive traditions, tastes, and terrain from the past. Across vast distances of landscape and time, via literal and figurative thirsts and hungers, these poems attentively sing of what  matters most and off er maps of both sustenance and survival. Exploring  lineage, lore, the Ukraine, motherhood, and the interface between natural and aesthetic realms, her taut yet expansive lyrics recognize beauty in all its largesse while interrogating its fine print, its small fees. Her singing serves as a present-tense suitor of both past and future:  amid all the not-knowing of memory and what’s-to-come, the intimacy and keen attention in these poems make home strange in the best of  ways.