Khrystia Vengryniuk’s Long Eyes is a collection of poems that guides us through the labyrinths of loneliness, where pain drifts like the wind and voices fade yet still echo on the edges of silence. It is both a confession that pours forth like rain from the heavens and a lingering hallucination that refuses to release its grip upon having subsided. Though these poems mark some of the author’s earliest work, their impact remains undiminished, speaking uncompromisingly to the madness of our current world. Volume 18 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

This book examines Russian and Ukrainian feature films to trace the roots and consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the cultural war stems from a colonial past, where Russia viewed Ukraine as an inferior “little brother.”

By examining cinematic representations of the countries’ shared history, this book reveals how Russia has used cinema to promote a strong, unified state and patriotic narratives, while Ukrainian cinema seeks to overcome colonial trauma and build a distinct national identity.

It also investigates how cultural memories of Kyivan Rus, the Cossacks, World War II, the Soviet past, and the Russian war in Ukraine are depicted differently in Russian and Ukrainian cinema.

How would you communicate the realities of living in a warzone to someone who has never had this experience? Thirty Ukrainian women, ages 10 to 72, answered this question in letters that emanate power, depth, pain, strength, and resilience. These fragments of life reveal the horrors of conflict but also the humanity of survivors.

This powerful volume brings together three of his early masterpieces: Anna’s Other Days, FM Galicia, and The UnSimple.

Anna’s Other Days is a quartet of experimental stories that blur the lines between memory and narrative, action and contemplation. Through fragmentary prose and philosophical depth, Prochasko explores in his stories how participation in a narrative, or part of it, captures one’s being.

With FM Galicia, Prokhasko adopts a peculiar form for presenting his writings, which is based on a collaboration between the writer and Ivano-­Frankivsk radio station Radio-­Vezha (Radio-­Tower) for which he did a daily reading of a one- or two-page text he had written. This program resulted in 46 short texts that were published as FM Galicia in 2001 by Lileia-­NV. These texts offer personal reflections on topics including, among other things, Prokhasko’s family, his days in the Soviet army, botany, cultural and religious figures, cities, and mountains.

The UnSimple is a novel that tells the story of an insulated community living in the fictional Carpathian mountain resort town of Yalivets in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a place with its own unique, artistic form of democracy, where a special screenwriting institute produces a play written by the people to guide their government’s actions, and many languages are spoken and understood by everyone, and everyone is allowed to speak their own language. In the novel, birth—not death—marks the end of a story.

For lovers of literary experimentation, Ukrainian culture, and philosophical prose, Earth Gods will be a true revelation!

Crimean Fig / Qirim Inciri: Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction features stories and poems, written by contemporary Crimea Tatar writers and poets, which are shadowed by history. Inevitably, they reflect the traumas endured by Crimean Tatars over the last three and a half centuries. They further chronicle the complex process of a population’s efforts at reintegration into an ancestral land from which they’d been exiled over more than half a century. One hears, in both the stories and poems, a cultural and national pride, love for a land of stunning natural beauty, and a longing for the stability of peace.

This book symbolizes the responses of Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods to the tragic events of the Jewish massacres at Babyn Yar in September 1941. It is first presented here in the original and in English translation by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin.

Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond aim to create a language capable of expressing the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust, as well as other peoples murdered at the site.

A Ukrainian journalist ends each day “scorched by another person’s grief.” A schoolgirl in Croatia cherishes her Barbie and learns to dread air raid sirens more than her geometry homework. A poet imagines the spiritual life of a fish who escapes the hook. An exiled artist recreates her homeland in the shape of a bird.

The writers assembled in this volume dream and document and remember, they translate one another’s work and meditate on fragility and resilience in the face of nihilism and obliteration. The collection gathers poems, essays, and stories written and translated in nine languages, reflecting an ongoing effort to communicate and understand across cultures.

Both Sides Face East–Durable Words began as a response to the invasion of Ukraine, but stakes a wider claim on behalf of human value and integrity.

Poetry from the frontline of the russo-Ukrainian war. Artur asks why we need poetry and answers with poems and a further explanation.

‘For a long time I had no answer to this question. I told myself that I didn’t know. After the full-scale invasion began, I stopped writing. Since the age of seventeen, I had believed that literature was my purpose in life, I thought that being a writer was something that carried weight and hadmeaning. And suddenly it turned out that there was no meaning at all. What can you write when children are being pulled from under the rubble? In what order do you arrange words to ease the pain? I decided that writing was pointless.
But I was wrong. Time needed to pass because it is impossible to write about today in the old language. It had to be reinvented. I had to lose faith in writing, admit that literature was helpless, begin hating all writers, forget every poem. I had to give up on language completely. And start from the beginning.

Let’s go back to the beginning. Now I have the answer. Why do we need poetry in a time of war? Why do we keep writing these poems, reading them, sharing them with each other like communion wafers or cigarettes? Why do we sometimes need to read something to feel love or even hate more fiercely? Why do we need poems?

To feel less lonely.’

A term of physiology and neurology, algometry is the science of measuring pain. However, it is not physical pain that Iryna Vikyrchak examines in Algometry, but her experiences growing up in Western Ukraine in the ’90s, emphasizing emotional sensitivity and inner strength, which give way to a philosophical and lyrical reflection on pain, suffering, and empathy as a measurement of our humanness.

In Algometry Vikyrchak presents a lyrical portrait of the generation of Ukrainians who grew up and were shaped by shared and individual painful internal and external experiences, to become a resilient and brave nation. First published in Kyiv in 2021, Algometry has since acquired new resonance: the title now seems to be a premonition, an anticipation of the big pain that came to Ukraine in February 2022, one that still lingers. The poems, organized in three corridors (Algometry—Anthropology—Amnesia), take the reader through an individual past, a common future, and a lyrical forever.

The poetry is complemented with an author’s essay on love, pain, words, and what unites all living beings—a key to understanding this book. Algometry won the 2022 Kovaliv Fund Literary Prize. Volume 17 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Set in Ukraine, Crimea, and Israel, this unique two-volume autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in Tsarist Russia and Israel during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy and became a shochet (kosher slaughterer) as a young man, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of his surroundings. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.

The memoir is brimming with information. Goldenshteyn’s adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities, epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, technology, modernity and secularization. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire and in the Land of Israel.

Volume two begins in 1873, when Goldenshteyn obtains his first position as a shochet in Slobodze, and it follows him to the Crimea, where he endures 34 years of vicissitudes. In 1913, he fulfills a dream of immigrating to the Land of Israel, hoping to find tranquility in his old age. Instead, he is met with the turbulence of the First World War, as battles rage between the retreating Ottoman Turks and the advancing British forces.

Informed by research in Ukrainian, Israeli and American archives and personal interviews with the few surviving individuals who knew Goldenshteyn personally, The Shochet is a magnificent new contribution to Jewish and Eastern European history.