Don’t Touch the Bones, this remarkable second collection by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, shows its author hard at work to transform the experience of cultural losses—of lands, language, and legacy—into a poetry of remembrance, homage, and power. She inherited generations of memories and found an uncommon resolve to record the emotional life of her people, Jews only recently emigrated from Ukraine. Though she might be seen as a documentarian of loss, her voice is not hectoring but elegiac, bringing a ferocious lyricism to what might otherwise be the repressed micro-histories, lost narratives of exile, and heirlooms of desperation and diaspora.

Her poems rake the oracle bones of her family’s flight from persecution, reading in their fissures a dialogic language both of sorrow and determination. —Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road

In A New Orthography, the Serhiy Zhadan focuses on daily life during the Russo-Ukrainian war, rendering intimate portraits of the country’s residents as they respond to crisis. Zhadan revives and revises the role of the nineteenth-century Romantic bard, one who portrays his community with clarity, preserving its most precious aspects and darkest nuances.

The poems investigate questions of home, exile, solitude, love, and religious faith, making vivid the experiences of noncombatants, refugees, soldiers, and veterans. This collection will be of interest to those who study how poetry observes and mirrors the shifts within a country during wartime, and it offers solace as well.

Volume 5 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

This is a study of a multicultural city in times when all norms collapse. Ola Hnatiuk presents a meticulously documented portrait of Lviv’s ethnically diverse intelligentsia during World War Two. As the Soviet, Nazi, and once again Soviet occupations tear the city’s social fabric apart, groups of Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish doctors, academics and artists try to survive, struggling to manage complex relationships and to uphold their ethos. As their pre-war lives are violently upended, courage and fear shape their actions. Ola Hnatiuk employs diverse sources in several languages to tell the story of Lviv from a multi-ethnic perspective and to challenge the national narratives dominant in Central and Eastern Europe.

Persephone Blues offers a selection of poems by one of the leading Ukrainian writers of her generation, Oksana Lutsyshyna. In the poems collected here “experience is a means of entombment.” Gender is no longer a measure of strength; neither is youth. Sometimes the dead can see each other again; love goes through its motions, while we remain in the animal kingdom. Inviting and potent, these poems suggest Ovid’s transformations continue unfolding around us with unexpected rapidity.

Author of four novels and four volumes of poetry, Lutsyshyna is currently a lecturer in Slavic Literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

In this Ukrainian bestseller, now available in English for the first time, Yaroslav Hrytsak examines the first three decades (1856–86) in the life of Ivan Franko, a prominent writer, scholar, journalist, and political activist who became an indisputable leader in the forging of modern Ukrainian national identity. Hrytsak does so against the background of small communities—Franko’s family, his native village, his colleagues, the editors of periodicals for which he worked, and the revolutionary circles with which he interacted—during a time when multi-ethnic Habsburg Galicia evolved into several modern nations.

This volume will remain a recognized standard for the study of the history of Ukraine and East Central Europe.

Having exploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Union and tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness. The Post-Chornobyl Library in Tamara Hundorova’s book becomes a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s, which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma of the 26th of April, 1986.

Ukrainian postmodernism turns into a writing of trauma and reflects the collisions of the post-Soviet time as well as the processes of decolonization of the national culture. A carnivalization of the apocalypse is the main paradigm of the post-Chornobyl text, which appeals to “homelessness” and the repetition of “the end of histories.” Ironic language game, polymorphism of characters, taboo breaking, and filling in the gaps of national culture testify to the fact that the Ukrainians were liberating themselves from the totalitarian past and entering the society of the spectacle.

Along this way, the post-Chornobyl character turns into an ironist, meets with the Other, experiences a split of his or her self, and witnesses a shift of geo-cultural landscapes.

This timely collection of stories is by a Sakharov Peace Prize-winning Ukrainian film director, whose political imprisonment in Russia since 2014 is an international cause célèbre.

Deeply rooted in Ukraine’s folk culture, Shuvalova’s poetry re-mixes traditional spirituality with pulsating eroticism and an acute awareness of the natural environment. Pray to the Empty Wells offers a long poetic meditation on memory and life’s natural cycles. Each word, like a life force, forms a connective substance that weaves between lines and verses.

Though the wells are empty, Shuvalova’s language overflows with rich images, corporeality, and a metaphoric sensibility that reaches across place and time and reverberates as a prayer against ancient stone.

Volume 4 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

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.

New York Elegies attempts to demonstrate how descriptions and evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout its development. The collection thus gives readers the opportunity to view New York through various poetic and stylistic lenses. Ukrainian poets connected themselves to a powerful myth of New York, the myth of urban modernity and problematic vitality.

The city of exiles and outsiders sees itself reflected in the mirror that newcomers and exiles created. By adding new voices and layers to this amalgam, it is possible to observe the expanded picture of this worldly poetic city.