Category Ukrainian
ECLIPSES LARGE AND SMALL: LYUDMYLA KHERSONSKA’S “TODAY IS A DIFFERENT WAR,” TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN BY OLGA LIVSHIN, ANDREW JANCO, MAYA CHHABRA, AND LEV FRIDMAN
Lyudmyla Khersonska’s collection “Today is a Different War” (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) focuses on the way domestic life has been affected and eclipsed by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Khersonska’s poems bring shimmering emotion to the brutality. Her style is easily accessible in a way that invites the reader to trust the poet. The reader becomes part of the poetic world as well as an occasional addressee.
Writing Through Memory and Digging Through Secrets of the Past: Mykola Bazhan’s “Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul,” edited by Oksana Rosenblum, Lev Fridman, and Anzhelika Khyzhnia
The poems included in Quiet Spiders precede a tragedy in Ukrainian history, the Holodomor, or famine of 1932-1933, and the period known as the Executed Renaissance when a generation of Soviet writers and artists were wiped out by Stalin’s regime.