Poetry from the Ukraine: Live Poetry Reading

Wednesday, August 9 @ 7pm ET

Featuring: David Acosta, Sibelan Forrester, Sean Hanrahan, Olga Livshin, Lynn Levin, and Warren C. Longmire

Live at Fergies Pub – 1214 Sansom Street

And on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrfuuoqjgjGNM2meg9Y-c3Zh8hI-tcRU5M

Moonstone is selling book bundles for the featured Ukrainian poets on our website. All profits will be donated to Ukraine TrustChain. Books are sold online and at the event.

Today is a Different War by Lyudmyla Khersonska

Translated by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman – $18.00, Arrowsmith Press – A portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. 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. Lyudmyla Khersonska is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine. She is the author of four poetry collections in Russian. Khersonska was recently included in the list, “33 International Women Writers Who are Bold for Change.” Olga Livshin is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman and her poems appear in various journals.  

In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine – Edited by Carolyn Forché & Ilya Kaminsky $22.00, Arrowsmith – “… Indeed, we have heard the barrage on the 6 o’clock news, but now we engage the war’s most apt witnesses who command the human heart through images and rhythms of language. These poems written primarily in Ukrainian, and then translated into English, refuse to glorify gore, but instead render reflection. Have we grown numb to body counts? Poets of the Ukraine deliver a reckoning, and the souls of a people are laid bare. … Such surrealism bears not only blinding terror, but also moments of natural beauty. … some fight even with their hands tied behind their backs.” -Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize winning poet

“We act like children with our dead,” Halyna Kruk writes as she struggles to come to terms with the horror unfolding around her: “confused,/ as if none of us knew until now/ how easy it is to die.” In poem after devastating poem, Kruk confronts what we would prefer not to see: “a person runs toward a bullet/ with a wooden shield and a warm heart…” 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.