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A NEW ORTHOGRAPHY

A NEW ORTHOGRAPHY

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-1-7333400-3-8

Pub Date: Mar. 2020

Pages: 158


By Serhiy Zhadan

John Hennessey and Ostap Kin, translators


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.


    The devastating and wildly charming poems in Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography, written in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War, once again make a startling case for the predominance of a lyrical imagination, especially during a geopolitical crisis. One might expect such poems to retreat to embittered irony or surreal escape. I am astounded at the large-scale heart of this work, the courageous persistence of an autonomous voice remarking on the dailiness of life in war time with apparent whimsy and an undercutting joy.

    —Major Jackson, comments on the selection of A New Orthography for Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2021


    Serhiy Zhadan is a Ukrainian poet, writer, essayist, and translator. English translations of Zhadan’s other work include the books of prose, Depeche Mode, Voroshilovgrad, and Mesopotamia (also features poetry) and a collection of poetry, What We Live For, What We Die For. He has received the 2015 Angelus Central European Literary Award (Poland), the 2014 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature (Switzerland), the 2009 Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literary Award (Ukraine), the 2006 Hubert Burda Prize for young Eastern European poets (Austria), and the BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year award in 2006, 2010, and 2014. Zhadan lives in Kharkiv.


    John Hennessy is the author of two collections, Coney Island Pilgrims and Bridge and Tunnel. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and serves as poetry editor for The Common.




    Ostap Kin is the editor of New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City and translator, with Vitaly Chernetsky, of Songs for a Dead Rooster by Yuri Andrukhovych and, with Ali Kinsella, of The Maidan After Hours by Vasyl Lozynsky. 

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