Ukraine may be the only country on earth that owes its existence, at least in part, to a poet. Ever since the appearance of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar in 1840, poetry has played an outsized role in Ukrainian culture. “Our anthology begins: Letters of the alphabet go to war and ends with I am writing/ and all my people are writing,” note the editors of this volume, acclaimed poets Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky. “It includes poets whose work is known to thousands of people, who are translated into dozens of languages, as well as those who are relatively unknown in the West.”

Translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine. These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine’s most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. In a dark recapitulation of evolution itself, Kruk writes: “nothing predicted the arrival of humankind…./ nothing predicted the arrival of the tank…” Her taught, lean lines can turn epigrammatic: “what will kill you will seduce you first,” or they can strike you like Lomachenko’s lightening jabs: “flirt, Cheka agent, bitch.”

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.

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.

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.

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.