Books

Happiness Street

Happiness Street

Olya Stoyanova · November 2025

Family relationships, travel and the importance of everyday connections take center stage in the sparse, deceptively simple poems in this award-winning poetry collection by Bulgarian poet Olya Stoyanova, translated by Katerina Stoykova. "In this spare yet expansive poetry collection, the Bulgarian poet Olya Stoyanova is an inveterate, incisive people watcher, reading the faces of strangers the way some of us read books: avidly, greedily, including between the lines. You feel her scanning, recording and interpreting what she sees in faces glimpsed on sidewalks, in windows and doorways in cities around the world. Then, in a series of imaginative leaps, she infers and invents tiny dramas that are nonetheless decisive. Nothing less than urban life itself, in all its crowdedness and isolation, is contained in these often quietly desperate poems."—Kevin Nance

The Chaos of Desire

The Chaos of Desire

Marin Bodakov · November 2024

This collection of poems by late Bulgarian poet Marin Bodakov, selected and translated by Katerina Stoykova, brings to English language readers Bodakov's minimalistic style—a few sparse words, each integral to building the structure of the poem. Nothing excessive or gratuitous. Yet somehow, the atomic cage of the poem unlocks something inside the reader—releases the trapped energy of unsaid truths. "Bodakov's poems rank alongside those of his contemporary surrealist masters—Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Octavio Paz, Nicanor Parra. Deftly translated by Katerina Stoykova, each work is spare, sinewy, full of small but powerful surprises that induce you to blink, pause, begin again. These are poems to linger over. Each reading brings new rewards."—Andrew Merton

The Invisible Arm of Peace

The Invisible Arm of Peace

Khairi Hamdan · December 2022

Accents Publishing is proud to bring to you an English language collection by Jordanian-Bulgarian poet Khairi Hamdan, selected and translated by Katerina Stoykova. In these poems you will find the sand of the Sahara Desert, the Bedouin, the Dervish, and unmediated conversations with God. You will encounter destroyed temples, refugee camps, border patrol, children with nontraditional names. You will also find lyrical poetry of intimate tenderness and the unrelenting drive to be a better human being.

The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry

The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry

Katerina Stoykova · January 2014

"The Season of Delicate Hunger brings us more than thirty Bulgarian poets whom the translators and editor successfully make us feel we need to listen to. The anthology is a valuable introduction to a wide variety of voices most of us have never heard before. The book comes as a gift both to international understanding and to American literature."—J. Kates, Editor of In The Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era