"These poems draw you in, gently but firmly, with telling detail and great emotional power. You share what Yvonne Green observes -- very beautifully -- about day-to-day experience; appreciate what she has personally learnt about suffering; and reflect with her on the contribution poetry can make to understanding (perhaps even resolving) the world's problems. Honoured, as well as being the title of a harrowing individual poem about female martyrdom, is well-chosen as the title of the book honouring the reader with its intelligence and compassion -- and with the occasional agreeable surprise." Alan Brownjohn "These are vital, fiercely moving poems, alive with the danger, fear, violence and loss of a diaspora. Yvonne Green invites us to "....know about coming from a country that doesn't exist" and takes us beyond borders and language in her expansive, profoundly relevant exploration of identity and the meaning of 'home'." Josephine Corcoran

"I like the way good food and diction go together so clearly... The poems are different to what one normally gets in English, the issues far bigger, as in 'Dhimmi Under Sharia Law' (A Lawyer's Poem) and in many others that one may benefit from." - Alan Sillitoe"These enthralling and lovely poems begin with rich recollections of another country ( so we ate, so we loved ), but darken into the shock of domestic violence. Her poems are absolutely straightforward to read, but quite unforgettable." - Alison Brackenbury"Yvonne Green takes us into the unfamilar world of Boukhara and Judeo Tajik culture with complete assurance. For all the lucidity of her poetry, her work has an unusual density. This is a fine new voice, which deserves to be widely heard." - Elaine Feinstein"Yvonne Green's poems are strange, evoking unfamiliar worlds and seeing them with their own kind of language. She effaces their merely subjective self and her poems get into their subjects. What matters is the voices out there, and she hears them. There is so much world, so many stories, included here. It is wonderful to encounter this vivid annex to experience and understanding." - Michael Schmidt

The Jewish, Odesa-born poet, Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin (1911-2003), was a central figure in modern Russian literature, although until recently, he was best known in the West for his role in preserving the manuscript of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate from the KGB. As a Soviet journalist in WW2, he witnessed and wrote about the horrors of Stalingrad, which led the Nobel Laureate Josef Brodsky to refer to him as 'Russia's war poet'. Later, during the years of Stalin's deportation of ethnic groups, Lipkin translated and preserved the language and writings of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Tatars and, in doing so, became a living repository of their culture for which he risked censure and arrest from the Soviet authorities. In this memoir, Lipkin's humanity, civic courage, and friendship with many important Russian writers - Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Platonov, and of course, Grossman himself - shine through the reports of terror and oppression that characterized this most turbulent period of Russian history.