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APRICOTS OF DONBAS

APRICOTS OF DONBAS

$24.00Price

ISBN: 978-1-7364323-1-0

Pub Date: Sept. 2021

Pages: 166


By Lyuba Yakimchuk

Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina, translators


Apricots of Donbas, by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk, is the 7th book in the LHP Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. As are previous volumes in the Series, it has been released in a dual language edition. 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 the complex emotional experiences of a civilian witnessing a gradual disintegration of her familiar surroundings, Yakimchuk’s poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of child-like 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 goes hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.


    Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter. Her two collections of poetry, iak Moda (2009) and Abrykosy Donbasu (2015) won prestigious awards, including the International Slavic Poetic Award (Ukraine) and the International Poetic Award of the Kovalev Foundation (USA). Since 2019, her play The Wall has been running at the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, the largest in Ukraine. She also authored the script for the film The Slovo House: An Unfinished Novel, reflecting on the literary life in the 1930’s Kharkiv. Born and raised in a small town near Luhansk, Yakimchuk now lives in Kyiv, Ukraine.



    Oksana Maksymchuk is the author of two collections of poetry in the Ukrainian language, Xenia and Lovy. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University and was named Writer in Residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University. 





    Max Rosochinsky is a scholar, translator, and poet from Simferopol, Crimea. With Maksymchuk, he co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.



    Svetlana Lavochkina is a Ukrainian-born novelist, poet, and translator residing in Germany. She was runner-up for the Paris Literary Prize, and finalist in both the Tibor&Jones Pageturner Prize and the Million Writers Award. Her novel in verse, Carbon, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2020.

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