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
