This collection of poems transforms the personal author’s loss into Ukraine’s collective experience. Since the outbreak of war in Donetsk in 2014, Iya Kiva has become an essential voice for the country’s internally displaced people, creating new metaphors for uncertainty and survival.

Originally writing in Russian, Kiva now writes in Ukrainian, reflecting her linguistic shift and her layered Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish heritage. Her work confronts the trauma of war while offering lyrical expressions of resilience, love, and hope for a united Ukraine.

Henry Hughes’ fifth book of poems, Sergeant Dark, carries us to the edge of the war in Ukraine and deep into Antarctica. These poems take us out shark fishing and bird watching, and into the bar and bedroom. They offer honest, humorous and hard looks at everyday life—love, marriage, parenting, money, religion, sports and politics—celebrating the joys and admitting the failures. “Hughes’ poems are conscious of the destruction and ‘heady wastes’ we humans make,” writes Annie Lighthart, but “they will not let go of the truth at the other end of the line—that the world is still vividly living and vividly loved.”

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.

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.

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.

In Yuliya Musakovska’s newest poetry collection, The God of Freedom, she reveals, facet by facet, the landscape of a turbulent, contemporary Ukraine. Equal parts intimate and expansive, the poems follow the societal struggles of women and their families, the trauma of returning soldiers, and the peoples’ future under the shadow of war and its tumultuous past. Translated by Musakovska and Olena Jennings, The God of Freedom reveals a moving, devastating, and all too necessary glimpse of Ukraine from one of the country’s most celebrated poets. Vibrant, relevant, and masterful, this volume stands out as a must-read work in translation, full of profound insights and captivating eloquence. With cover art by Anastasiia Starko.

Lost in Living presents Halyna Kruk’s unpublished work from the immediate “pre-invasion” years when life in Ukraine was marked by turmoil but full-scale war was not yet normalized. In these “dear poems that don’t pain [her] like those about the war do,” Kruk uses imagery and tone to underscore poetic agency, at times juxtaposing figurative language with a calm, direct voice to bring her poems to life.

Nature cannot be relied on to sustain nor renew, and life is shown to be fundamentally vulnerable. “Calm” is a seductive state of mind capable of cunning, and the speaker is unable to find a place where she can thrive or grow. Still, daily tasks emerge as life-affirming and a welcome constant. It is ultimately a movement toward survival that drives the immediacy and urgency of Kruk’s poetry.

Volume 16 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Prismatic and polysemous, On the Road to Lviv invites us on an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war. “This chronicle/ Took shape the day the war began, which was/ My 65th birthday,” writes legendary traveler, war correspondent, memoirist and poet Christopher Merrill. At once deeply personal yet rooted in history so recent you can almost see the smoke billowing from the ruins of Mariupol, the poem is equal parts chronicle, a document of war crimes, and a sober self-reflection in which the poem’s speaker examines his own engagement with Ukraine as a “democratic-minded” Westerner “determined to develop/ Civil societies around the world.” Not since Byron’s Mazeppa has there been an English-language poem comparably engaged with Ukrainian history, appearing here en face with Nina Murray’s masterly translation into Ukrainian.