Lyudmyla Khersonska’s striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine shows us images that will sear themselves in your memory. No other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what’s in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems.

One of the most important Ukrainian voices throughout the Russian invasion, the author of Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees, collects his searing dispatches from the heart of Kyiv.

A Violin from the Other Riverside is a bilingual collection by an outstanding Ukrainian poet of the post-World War II generation, Dmytro Kremin. It is a philosophical bow strung with a Ukrainian timeline arrow: its nock in the prehistoric Pontic steppe; its fletching made of Scythia, Ancient Greece, and Rome; its shaft of the Cossack lore. The arrow’s sharp point is aimed at the warfare which Ukraine has been subjected to by Russian occupiers since 2014.

Passionate yet impartial, the Violin performs a complex tune of elements and temperaments, epic and drama, love and hate, universal and personal, wisdom and folly. Each poem is akin to a dictionary entry on Ukraine composed in complex and intellectually laden—yet colourful and virtuosic—light-footed verse. Kremin proved to be prophetic in his harbingering of Ukraine’s martyrdom and glory as the world battlefield of darkness and light.

Volume 12 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Details of an Hourglass chronicles the anti-world of Soviet prison camps in miniature-poem reflections. Its author, Mykola Horbal, spent sixteen years in the notorious Gulag system where he suffered under grueling labor, deprivation, and humiliation. Stripping down the poetic word to its bare form, Horbal’s verses are brief, terse, and densely layered with metaphor.

Alongside emptiness, anger, irony, and absurdity, there is beauty, hope, and faith. Horbal describes his harsh reality as a “freeing spiritual journey.” He distances himself from falsehood, servility, and despair by seeking solace and peace in an inner world filled with nature and God’s grace. Today, the Soviet prison system has collapsed, but the need to bear witness to that past is vital. World-wide human rights repressions and unjust incarcerations thrive through both subtle, sophisticated methods and brazen military aggression and brutality. Horbal’s poetry is an aphoristic testament that you can imprison the body but not the spirit.

Volume 13 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Winter King by Ostap Slyvynsky presents a selection from a decade and a half worth of work by one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary voices in poetry. Slyvynsky is the poet of everyday things. He writes of children’s games, old trees, and family stories. Yet, what emerges from under his pen is the portrait of an era. His writing, simultaneously delicate and unflinchingly incisive, like a surgeon’s hand, always probes for the bottomless depths gaping behind the mundane. Perhaps the greatest of Slyvynsky’s gifts as a poet is his ability to examine individual voices and memories for traces of larger historical events without ever trivializing the former in the face of the latter.

His spare, lean poems unearth a complex and layered human reality that is both universal and strikingly, almost painfully, rooted in the landscape that birthed it, be it the poet’s family home in the Carpathian Mountains or the Maidan Square in Kyiv, aflame with revolution. Slyvynsky’s remarkable attention to detail results in strikingly beautiful and enigmatic texts that invite multiple re-readings, each peeling off yet another layer of reality. However, what always remains at the core after these layers are stripped off is the poet’s profound humanity.

Drawing on three of Slyvynsky’s earlier poetry collections, this volume also includes some of his most recent poems­—arguably, among the poet’s best.

Volume 14 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev was imprisoned from 2015 to 2017 in a concentration camp set up by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. He spent most of that time in Izolyatsia—a defunct insulation materials factory that the Russians converted into a torture camp.

In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Aseyev’s story exposes Russia’s brutal actions against Ukraine, long before the war began in 2022. Torture, isolation, rape, and psychological abuse have been routinely deployed by Russians against Ukrainians since 2014 in what can be described as a genocidal war. Aseyev’s moving story is also a reflection on how a person can survive atrocities and return to the world to share their experiences while maintaining their humanity.

This memoir is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the price of truth in the occupied Donbas.

This first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro (until 2016 Dnipropetrovsk, until 1926 Katerynoslav) locates the city in a broader regional, national, and transnational context and explores the interaction between global processes and everyday routines of urban life. The history of a place (throughout its history called ‘new Athens’, ‘Ukrainian Manchester’, ‘the Brezhnev`s capital’ and ‘the heart of Ukraine’) is seen through the prism of key threads in the modern history of Europe: the imperial colonization and industrialization, the war and the revolution in the borderlands, the everyday life and mythology of a Soviet closed city, and the transformations of post-Soviet Ukraine. Designed as a critical entangled history of the multicultural space the book looks for a new analytical language to overcome the traps of both national and imperial history-writing.

This study situates the stance of the United States toward Ukraine in the broader context of international relations. It fills an important lacuna in existing scholarship and policy discourse by focusing on the complex trilateral—rather than simply bilateral—dynamics among the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia, in 1991–2016.

This book brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials. The study is also supplemented by open-ended interviews with former and returning officials.

A story collection featuring acclaimed, award-winning contemporary voices from Ukraine.