Katerina Stoykova

How God Punishes Katerina Stoykova

Poetry. HOW GOD PUNISHES:

Gives you
the small prize. Mercifully
you never learn
of the big one.

It is altogether fitting that these lines begin Katerina Stoykova's poetic meditation, for in 2014 the Bulgarian version of HOW GOD PUNISHES (published by ICU) won the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Award, presented annually by the Bulgarian publishing house Zhanet 45 and recognized as that nation's premier poetry prize. So in the end she did receive a small prize indeed! But it is her readers who are treated to the big one in the form of the insights shared in these pages. And now at last comes this version for English-speaking readers, prepared by the author, who is equally at home in both languages and divides her time between her native Bulgaria and her adopted Kentucky.

It is, in the author's words, a self ironic work, a book about truth- telling, regret and ego, that walks the reader through several stages of personal development across its seven parts and epilogue. Along the way there is humor, of the kind that catches in the throat and the heart, along with hard-learned wisdom, and most of all deep and loving humaneness. The God that administers these punishments is not off in some distant celestial realm, but present in the process of living day by day, of trying and failing and trying again, perfecting us for all our imperfections. In this, there is surely grace.