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In 2022, poet Ostap Slyvynsky undertook the role of wartime lexicographer, carefully collecting and compiling a dictionary of witness to Russia's invasion and war against Ukraine. Among the voices represented in A Ukrainian Dictionary of War are those who were forced to leave their homes and venture into the unknown, aid volunteers, medics, social activists, and artists. All very different people connected by the experience that war has appeared in their lives. Presented in a dual-language format, this volume showcases the Ukrainian language and its alphabet. Part of the Russian Federation's attack on Ukraine is an attack on its language. Despite efforts to the contrary, Ukrainian has grown in recognition and use, which this dictionary further extends to interested readers.

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. The setting is Ukraine at the start of the twenty-first century, but it is eerily recognizable anywhere. These brief lyric poems speak about the memory of historical trauma and witness stark individual voices that pierce the wall of complacency. What is the music of such times? What is its metaphysics? This collection gives us an unflinching, memorable response.

Author of nine books of poetry, essays, and memoir, John Daniel recently won the 2011 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction for his collection of essays, The Far Corner. He is the author of Rogue River Journal. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University--and a former logger, hod carrier, railroader, and rock climbing instructor--Daniel lives in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.

In Zeller’s first book, Rust Fish, a young woman has a conversation with the succulent natural world. They speak of the endless summers of youth, the sober winters of the Pacific Northwest, the violence of children, and the benign neglect that nature offers even its acolytes.Throughout the book, fish are this speaker’s consorts. Fish, both real and imagined, stream through these poems, past the various totems of working class poverty to the inevitable sea. Zeller asks many big questions in quiet, sly ways in this wonder-full book. How can a person live in such a gorgeous and difficult world? How can the sensual redeem us? Which is the bruise that heals? Which is the one that stays?

The inner heart commotion of Henry Real Bird is poised in a physical and metaphysical terrain marked by the history, culture, language and identity of his Apsaalooke nation. At the same time, no one else contemplates broncs, Chinook winds, the Wolf Teeth Mountains, and forgotten creek beds in the way that Real Bird does -- his is a careful, astute eye that reminds us again and again of our own interrelation, of our responsibility to all beings, all places that make up our world and beyond.

88 Maps is Rob Carney's 4th full-length collection of poems that discusses how to find our way around in the New West, how to live in its physical and metaphysical suburbs. It's about the times, places, and wildness we should say yes to by praising and laughing and telling stories. And it's about looking at all our real and figurative cul-de-sacs and saying no. It's a collection of praise songs, mini-essays, challenges to rampant development and the injustice of market-crashed home foreclosures, and narratives commemorating the last best places, and 21st century fables.

In Shann Ray’s collection, Balefire, one senses always the poet’s tender regard for family as well as the forces of nature that flesh, flame, and fray each human relationship,

Habitation collects the best poetry from a career spanning more than forty years by the distinguished northwest poet-editor-translator, Sam Hamill. Drawn from fifteen volumes of celebrated poetry, whether in brief haiku-like poems or long-ranging narratives, Habitation presents a lyrical voice is unique in American poetry today. Jim Harrison has declared, "Hamill has reached the category of a National Treasure," and Hayden Carruth has written, "[His] poetry is no less than essential.

This second book by Andrea Werblin is filled with wry, savvy poems embodying cautiously accepted psychic discoveries (“your better synaptic self”) that gesture toward careful self-unmaskings. “So much music was misunderstood,” the speaker muses in the first version of the title poem, like the youthful self-delusions to which we all must wise up - their “Lyric exhausted, impermeable to sun.”The lullaby for one fist of Werblin’s first book is muted here, but the speaker tells herself to accept what is, to “swear / it is nothing personal.” Although these current days of rest have the sound turned off, she knows she must “rehearse, rehearse” her human perseverance.

The poems in Derek Annis's debut collection, Neighborhood of Gray Houses, wander through a landscape darkened by childhood abandonment and loss, before coming to rest in a home illuminated by new life and cautious optimism. The speaker comes to consciousness at a time when parental contracts have been breached and in a world falling apart, and as it falls apart, the poems become increasingly surreal, increasingly sure of the world's uncertainty. Ultimately, the birth of the speaker's daughters provides direction, a way out of the neighborhood of gray houses, to a place with more solid footing.

Albert Goldbarth’s new collection is a community of poems that makes room for other voices than the autobiographical “I”: some fantastical, some historical/celebrity, some the neighbours down the block.The poems themselves offer a rich spectrum of possibilities, from the comic to the grievous, from a poem of five lines to a poem of six pages, but all presented by a poet whose broad understanding of history and of a wide range of character types allows him to people his writing with everyone from presidents to prostitutes, and from ancient mythmakers to contemporary celebrities - all the while remaining present as a smart and earnest voice.

Winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2019. Rich in detail, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's Don't Touch the Bones is a compelling collection that examines the pain of the world's, a nation's, and a family's history.

A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan is the fifth volume in Lost Horse Press's Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. In these poems, the poet 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.

Donetsk, the black gem of Ukraine--Eden and Sodom in one, a stew steaming with coal fever, Manifest Destiny of Europe's east: Svetlana Lavochkina sends readers on a double odyssey with 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.

The poems in Polly Buckingham's debut collection, The River People, move through both dream and natural landscapes exploring connection and loss, abundance and degradation, the personal and the political. The speaker in these poems is often in a state of not knowing that can be both terrifying and revelatory. It is a state in which windows and doors connect the living and the dead and the inner and outer worlds. Organized in four sections that move from Florida to the Pacific Northwest, the poems are heavily imagistic and reminiscent of deep image poetry and Spanish surrealism.

Mark Neely's third collection, Ticker, follows the life of its main character, Bruce, as he navigates marriage, children, aging parents, politics, race, religion, global catastrophe, and the irrelevance of middle age. Throughout the book the dueling voices in Bruce's head, which range from comic to bitter to revelatory, compete for control of his inner life. From formal to freewheeling, Neely's poems showcase a unique and essential voice in American poetry.

Seed-Wheel is a lyric grown from the taut, ardent beauty of simple speech that seeks a way through the broken places in the ground of our imagination. The past and the present abide in these poems, as intimate as breath: migrations and altars, silence and wonderment, miseries and mysteries, and the stubborn cargo of our collective and personal histories.Here is the testimony of ancestors - and of the land itself - moments outside of time in which the living and the dead dwell in common, listening to the blow of northern wind. In a world drenched in harm and limbic quarrel, these poems testify to the power of language to reach across imposing and imposed boundaries, enter the public square, and sing.

Apricots of Donbas is a bilingual collection by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine's industrial east, 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 her complex emotional experiences,Yakimchuk's poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of childlike 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 go hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.

Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow brings together a selection of Natalka Bilotserkivets's poetry from 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. She 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 her birth land, 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 return to shed light on the missing history.

Masquerade is a jazz-inflected, lyric-narrative sequence of poems, a "memoir in poetry" set principally in pre-Katrina New Orleans and in Seattle, involving an interracial couple who are artists and writers. Moved by mutual fascination, shared ideals and aspirations, and the passion they discover in each other, the two are challenged to find a place together in the cultures of both races and families, amid personal and political dislocations as well as questions of trust--all against the backdrop of America's racism and painful social history. The twentieth century's global problem, the color line, as W. E. B. du Bois named it, is enacted here in microcosm between these lovers and fellow artists, who must face their own fears and unresolved conflicts in each other. Similar stories have been told from the male protagonist's point of view; Masquerade is unique in foregrounding the female perspective.

In Memory of a Banyan Tree is a collection of poems relating to nature, ecology, and ecopoetics, selected from the expanse of Rothenberg's writings over the past thirty-five years. Rothenberg's many years as a horticulturist and his engagement in the environmental movement inform his work. These poems are a watershed account of an intimate relationship with the outside world.

In this collection, 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 a concluding essay, artistic director Virlana Tkacz relates the story of the translations collected in this volume and the productions she staged with them at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York.

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 visual images are stunningly detailed, and her poetic language rich and exuberant.

In a minimalistic and narrative style, Olena Jennings' The Age of Secrets reflects on the relationships between girls and the secrets they keep. Characters Natalie and Aja are both objects of the narrator's affection. She sees that world through the lens of love for them, a lens coloured by the senses, especially the sense of smell.The section "Paper Doll Album" connects with the author's exhibition of the same title in which the poems were brought to life through textile art. The poems reach beyond the pages. "The Spell of History," the second segment, concentrates on the theme of memory and history. Memory stretches back to include ancestors' memories. History is in the happenings that have not quite become part of the past, such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic.The voices in these poems carry past trauma with them into the present Russian invasion of Ukraine. And the final poems in the book address the war and offer images of hope.

A Violin from the Other Riverside is a dual-language collection by outstanding Ukrainian poet of the post-World War II generation, Dmytro Kremin (1953-2017). 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 occupants 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.

Letisia Cruz's latest collection, Migrations & Other Exiles, many years in the making, includes poems that began as simple explorations of the poet's past and as a way of accepting the violence of her youth without fear or self-judgment. Cruz's parents immigrated to the U.S. when she was a child. A few years later, her father was murdered in the hallway of their apartment building in New Jersey. After his death, Cruz's mother remarried into a deeply abusive relationship that nearly ended her life. These poems are rooted in the violence of those years. They explore immigrant issues, exile, Latina/minority women's issues, the death of father, mother's experience with domestic violence, and the relationships of her youth.

The 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 a 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.

Lost in Living presents Halyna Kruk's unpublished work from the immediate "pre-invasion" years when life in Ukraine was marked by turmoil but full-scale war was not yet normalized. In these "dear poems that don't pain [her] like those about the war do," Kruk uses imagery and tone to underscore poetic agency, at times juxtaposing figurative language with a calm, direct voice to bring her poems to life. Nature cannot be relied on to sustain nor renew, and life is shown to be fundamentally vulnerable. "Calm" is a seductive state of mind capable of cunning, and the speaker is unable to find a place where she can thrive or grow. Still, daily tasks emerge as life-affirming and a welcome constant. It is ultimately a movement toward survival that drives the immediacy and urgency of Kruk's poetry. Lost in Living is the sixteenth volume in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Poetry Series.

Secret Work is interested in hidden labor of all sorts, from the work of a wage-earner in a big box store, to the work of mothering as a single parent, to the work of introspection and writing poems. These strands are connected to larger questions about the struggle to be in right relationship with one another and the natural world.Secret Work is interested in hidden labor of all sorts, from the work of a wage-earner in a big box store, to the work of mothering as a single parent, to the work of introspection and writing poems. These strands are connected to larger questions about the struggle to be in right relationship with one another and the natural world.