Hidden, by John A. deSouza

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The conflict in Ukraine drags on, with over ten years of war and over three years of full-scale invasion by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Written in the early months of 2025, the 12-poem sequence that comprises deSouza’s Hidden offers varied approaches to finding meaning in the midst of the tragic violence. With passages like: ‘the metal/flail of war,/the thrust and stab of love. Bullets torn flesh cannot hurt this’ deSouza sets out what remains of value against the backdrop of cruelty, lies and political posturing. The truth will out, and deSouza’s poems suggest there is more at stake and more ways to fight and resist then what media outlets and some politicians might have us believe.

“John A. deSouza’s Hidden is a powerful exploration of the nexus of history and personal experience in shaping the identities of those living in Ukraine and other nations where the exercise of authoritarian cruelty over citizens contributes to both defensiveness and a fierce assertiveness in those affected. deSouza is a compassionate writer, fully aware of the long history of oppression in the middle European nations that have been battlegrounds, as sites of environmental disaster (Chernobyl), mass murder (of Cossacks, the Holodomor famine, Babi Yar, Auschwitz, gulags, and the horrors of Putin’s war on Ukraine), but also the enduring strength of individuals, ‘like the old woman’s prayer / for an end to suffering, seated at a table at the center / of a house without walls.’

The book is punctuated by Ukrainian terms and historical references that can be challenging to those with only a casual grasp of history, as in the reference to Dresden in the opening poem—not the carpet bombing inflicted by the allies in World War II, but the fact that when the young KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin requested armored support for suppressing civilians when they stormed the local Stasi headquarters after the fall of the Berlin Wall was told: ‘Moscow is silent...’ The poems herein benefit from an understanding of the history involved, and will reward those who unravel the references and place them with the identities of those victims struggling to be free.”

—David Cope, award-winning poet, editor of The Correspondence of David Cope & Allen Ginsberg 1976-1996

John A. deSouza resides in Jersey City, NJ with his partner, Oksana, and their terrier, Mr. Darcy. John studied English Literature at the University of Toronto and works with online information. His poetry has been published in The Writing Disorder, WayWords, Apricity Press, the engine(idling, The Orchards Poetry Journal, All Existing Literary Review, Half Eaten Mouth, David Cope’s Big Scream Magazine, and has been translated in China in New World Poetry. His as yet unpublished collection, Unimaginable Hardship, poems for Ukraine based on Goya’s Disasters of War, was recently short-listed for the Letter Review Prize (2024). John’s wife's family is Ukrainian or of strongly traditional Canadian-Ukrainian background.