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.

Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow brings together a selection of Natalka Bilotserkivets poetry written over the last four decades. Having established an English language following largely on the merits of a single poem, Bilotserkivets’s larger body of work continues to be relatively unknown. Natalka Bilotserkivets was an active participant in Ukraine’s Renaissance of the late-Soviet and early independence period.

Now, nearly thirty years on, much has changed in the land of her birth, but the lyricism and urgency in Bilotserkivets’s poetry remain; her voice still speaks about movement and restricted movement, even symbolic movement. Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow endeavors to go back to shed light on the missing history.

Volume 8 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine’s industrial east, Lyuba Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014, when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants, and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees. Reflecting the complex emotional experiences of a civilian witnessing a gradual disintegration of her familiar surroundings, Apricots of Donbas is a versatile collection, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of child-like babbling about the tools and toys of military combat.

Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk’s voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems’ artfulness goes hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.

Volume 7 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Donetsk, the black gem of Ukraine—Eden and Sodom in one, a stew steaming with coal fever, Manifest Destiny of Europe‘s east: the reader is sent onto a double Odyssey of two adventurers, the fiery blacksmith Alexander and the elusive linguist Lisa, whose paths are destined to cross on the cusp of the war in the Donbas. Only one of them fathoms that their encounter goes far beyond its face-value purpose.

A thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Carbon is told in polyphonic verse—a prayer for the beloved, anguished city, Donetsk.

Mountain and Flower is Mykola Vorobiov’s second book in English translation, presenting a selection of poems spanning more than fifty years of his poetic craft. The book begins with early poems from his first collection, Remind Me for the Road, to his most recent works. One of the founding members of the nonconformist literary group known as the Kyiv School of Poetry, early Vorobiov is known for his preoccupation with metaphor and surreal imagery. In his more mature poetry he reveals himself as a master of miniature, with considerable affinity to Japanese haiku where the perception of a fleeting moment constitutes the essence of his poems’ rationale. Nature reigns supreme in Vorobiov’s poetic oeuvre and it provides him with endless opportunity for creating startling images.

His intuitive connection to the surrounding environs is so penetrating and organic that his visions, however strange, come across as convincing and justified. There are hardly any references to Ukrainian realities (past or present) in his poetry. Vorobiov’s concerns hover around the issues of existence on all possible levels—plants, animals, humans, inanimate objects, and the universe. The poet is not interested in conveying the past; rather, he trusts his imagination as the ultimate source of creativity. Mountain and Flower attempts to penetrate the invisible that has no beginning and no end, and invites the reader to plunge into this mysterious unknown.

Volume 6 in the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

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.

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.