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.

Songs for a Dead Rooster presents a selection of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych, one of contemporary Ukraine’s leading writers. While Andrukhovych is well known internationally as a novelist and essayist, his recognition in Ukraine was first as a poet, and poetry remains a key part of his creative output. This volume gathers selections from two distinct periods of Andrukhovych’s poetry. The first spans the 1980s through the early 1990s, associated with his involvement as a founding member of the Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Sideshow-Buffoonery) group of Ukrainian poets. This writing is characterized by openness, fluidity of structure, and an overall formal exuberance.

After publishing only prose for a number of years, Andrukhovych returned to poetry in 2004 with a much-changed poetics with the collection, Songs for a Dead Rooster. These later poems represent a different Andrukhovych: older, well-traveled, moving from early exuberance to a more subdued, melancholic tone. Rooted in the autobiographical here and now, their voice is bold and fresh, open, fragile, and unaffected. Perhaps most importantly, Andrukhovych’s later poetry manages to combine, in a truly masterly fashion, the rootedness in all the problems, complexes, and neuroses of the post-Soviet/postcolonial double bind, in which Ukrainian culture finds itself, on the one hand, and the emphatic engagement with the processes of cultural globalization, on the other.

Volume 2 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Series. Bilingual Edition.

In A Field of Foundlings, Starovoyt investigates Ukraine’s suppressed generational memory of the 20th century and the new context of its retelling in Eastern Europe. Drawing on the paradoxes of mythology, technology, and tradition, Starovoyt brings the traces of undesirable histories and the minefields of memory into unexpected constellations that interrogate assertions of knowledge and meaning-making in our world today.

In a time where the chaos and power of forces beyond our own seem to diminish the potency of the past, Starovoyt’s poems invoke a conscious dialogue with a past that is not severed from the ever-changing present, but echoes in our sense of self, brings some continuity to our daily decisions, and orients us toward the future.

Volume 1 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.