Kateryna Kalytko’s sophisticated poetry volume, Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don’t Know Anyone, deals with separations and changes, hinting at the ongoing war in Ukraine. One can intuit that the characters, succinctly depicted, are Crimean Tatars, Jews, or the displaced citizens of Ukraine, refugees from the occupied territories.

However, these departures and partings, acute alienation and pain that permeate the poems, could also be read as elements of a more philosophical and global matrix, relevant to any region and each and every human being. Losses, wars, and abandoned houses in Kalytko’s poetry are elevated to the realm of the universal myth of home and its loss, akin to the banishment from the garden of Eden. Kalytko’s visual images are stunningly detailed, and her poetic language rich and exuberant.

Volume 11 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

In this heartfelt collection of poems, Marianna Kiyanovska honors Holocaust victims by telling their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. The poems share the experiences of ordinary people facing the unbearable events that led to the Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv, using a first-person, captivating, and sometimes alienating approach.

Conceived as a tribute to those who fell, the book raises complex questions about memory, responsibility, and how we remember those who witnessed evil that borders on the unspeakable.

CARBIDE explores the underbelly of the Ukrainian smuggling industry. The protagonist, Tys, a merciless yet loving parody of Ukrainian nationalism, concocts a hairbrained scheme to dig a tunnel from the imaginary western Ukrainian city of Vedmediv to Hungary and force the European Union to grant Ukraine admission by smuggling its entire population into a member-country. Hilarity inevitably ensues, along with danger, when Tys, the would-be ‘Moses of Ukraine’, recruits a gang of local smugglers, including a latter-day Icarus determined to fly over the border and a femme fatale who traffics human organs. This timely novel offers a funny, yet tragic take on increasingly urgent topics such as the meaning of borders, nationalism, and European identity.

This novel tells the story of Haba Habinsky, a refugee from Donbas, who has moved to Kyiv at the beginning of the Ukrainian-Russian war. His physical displacement–​​and subsequent conscious adoption of the Ukrainian language–puts him in a state of disorientation, during which he is forced to question his beliefs. This novel illustrates how people undergo radical transformations and how these changes affect their interpersonal relationships and cultural identification.

Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love is Rafeenko’s first novel translated into English, which was shortlisted for the Shevchenko National Prize in 2021.

In this exceptional collection of dispatches from occupied Donbas, writer and journalist Stanislav Aseyev details the internal and external changes observed in the cities of Makiïvka and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

Aseyev scrutinizes his immediate environment and questions himself in an attempt to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the working-class residents of the industrial region of Donbas. 

With his signature humor, Ukraine’s most famous novelist presents a balanced and illuminating portrait of modern conflict along the Russian border.

Three Wooden Trunks is a collection of poems about memory and the poet’s Ukrainian roots, and of the poet’s family’s pursuit of a sweeter, easier life in America.

Boris Khersonsky and Ludmila Khersonsky write poetry that speaks to the crisis of our time, when refugees run from bombardments, nonstop propaganda flows from TV and neighbors begin to hate their neighbors.

It is Ukraine, at the start of the 21st century, but it is also eerily recognizable anywhere. These brief lyric poems speak about the memory of historical trauma and witness stark individual voices that pierce through the wall of complacency. What is the music of such times? What is its metaphysics? This collection of poetry from two contemporary voices gives us an unflinching, memorable response.

Volume 9 in the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

In Dream Bridge: Selected Poems, Oleh Lysheha creates worlds in which horses drawn on Paleolithic caves speak their truths and the glance of a swan can transform a lost soul. Each poem leads us down an invisible path that keeps shifting, transforming us and our ideas of poetry, together with the story.

In the 1970s Oleh Lysheha was expelled from Lviv University for translating modern American poetry and was sent to serve in the Red Amy in the Buryat Republic of Siberia. There he found his lifelong interest in Asian and indigenous cultures. Known as a “poets’ poet,” Lysheha’s poems were also used by Yara Arts Group, as texts for theatre pieces. In a concluding essay in the book, Artistic Director Virlana Tkacz, relates the story of the translations she created with Wanda Phipps collected in this volume and the productions she staged with them at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York.

Volume 10 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Clytemnestra plotting her husband’s murder, Ophelia criticizing her creator, and a report from Chernobyl all offer the poet occasions for reflections marked by a sophisticated wit and a philosophical probing reminiscent of Wislawa Szymborska or Adam Zagajewski. By turns urgent and ironic, Zabuzhko’s poetry stands alongside the finest and most important work to emerge from Europe in the last half century.