Happiness Street

Olya Stoyanova

Accents Publishing is proud to present Happiness Street, a poetry collection by award winning Bulgarian poet Olya Stoyanova. Family relationships, travel and the importance of everyday connections take center stage in these sparse, deceptively simple poems.

What Others Say About Happiness Street

Reading the poems in Olga Stoyanova's Happiness Street ignited an existential lobe in my brain. I wish I had an MRI printout to prove it. The poet replaces the question "why am I here" with "how did I get here" and "where am I going," said journey both literal and figurative. In "Bread," the practical woman who peddles the title food waits for buyers to come to her because: "the bread is like the sun—/early morning/it will rise on its own,/by evening/there will be nothing left." In the three lines of "Describing a Feeling" the speaker says: "Patience is/kneading bread when you/know it's not enough." Never having quite enough food also means never having quite enough time or love or energy, but these poems transport the reader over land, by sea, and through clouds to celebrate human resilience tinged with irony.

—Jennifer Litt, author of Strictly From Hunger

In her spare yet expansive poetry collection, Happiness Street, 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—"Small Moments," one of her section titles, applies just as well to the overall volume—that are nonetheless decisive. Nothing less than urban life itself, in all its crowdedness and isolation, is contained in these often quietly desperate poems. Stoyanova makes an excellent guide.

—Kevin Nance, author of Smoke

Small Stories

She likes to write notes—
"I love you" to her husband,
"I'm thinking of you" to her child,
"thank you" to her mother.
It's a little ludicrous actually,
but her loved ones don't speak of these things,
even pretend
they've never
discovered anything in their pockets.
Still, she's been doing this a while—
since the day
she read somewhere
that a woman jumped from the fourteenth floor,
and in her pocket, a note:
"five eggs and a loaf of bread."

Details and Ordering

Publication Date: November 15, 2025
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-961127-10-4
Price: $19.00

About the Author

Olya Stoyanova is a poet, writer and playwright based in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is interested in the relationship between poetry and science, nonfiction writing and social problems, dramaturgy and women's point of view. Olya is the author of five poetry collections, a novel, two short story collections and three nonfiction books. Her last poetry book, Happiness Street, won two national awards for the best poetry book of the year 2013: the Ivan Nikolov award and the Nikolay Kunchev award. She won the National Askeer Award for the Best Dramatic Text of the Year twice, in 2014 and 2018, for the plays Invitation to Dinner and The Color of Deep Waters. Her plays Invitation to Dinner (Sofia Theatre, 2014), The Color of Deep Waters (Ivan Vazov National Theatre, 2017), and Fear of Taming (Ivan Vazov National Theatre, 2020) are currently on stage.

Olya Stoyanova is the Editor in Chief at Bulgarian National Radio Network's Hristo Botev Channel for Culture, Science and Education, and a Lecturer in the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication at Sofia University.