Smokes

Yuri Izdryk’s Smokes explodes with existential contemplations and addresses regarding love, identity, nature, society, and the divine. The poems teem with energy; Izdryk’s indefatigable play with language encompasses incessant punning rhymes, Joycean multilingual puns, ludic shifts of tone and register, and scintillating intertextual games.

In creating a sophisticated semantic soundscape where sound and rhythm defiantly drive meaning, Izdryk impishly reinvigorates Ukrainian poetry, which only recently had begun to lean towards free verse, by re-invoking its strong rhyming tradition. In these poems, linguistic dexterity is the roll of the dice that, though it can’t vanquish apocalyptic despair, can keep its desolation—at least briefly—at bay.

Volume 3 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.