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QUEEN SATURDAY

QUEEN SATURDAY

$24.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9890965-6-5

Pub Date: Spring 2026

Pages: 140


By Borys Khersonsky

Svetlana Lavochkina and Oksana Rosenblum, translators


Queen Saturday brings English language readers the unique voice of a poet at large in the unbounded spaces of memory. It is the first bilingual collection of Ukrainian verse by Borys Khersonsky—a post-World War II generation poet, clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, and former Soviet dissident. In these poems, heaven is often the setting: Jews who perished during pogroms and in the Holocaust continue with their daily routines, whereas on earth, displacement has become a constant, and collective memory has been cleansed of the Jewish past. Khersonsky’s lyrical speaker moves through Odesa’s courtyards, Transcarpathian towns, and the scarred mountains of Crimea, closing the distance between vanished streets and imagined afterlives of countless Jewish kin. Ethnic and artistic identities are fractured and distorted in the unrelenting vise of empire—first Russian, then Soviet, and now the colonial violence of Russian aggression in Ukraine. With mordant wit and prophetic clarity, Khersonsky reimagines prayer, anecdote, and historical testimony, charting a topography of survival and loss.

 

    Khersonsky tells it like it is, without compromising. Few poets, these days, can give such a precise diagnosis. “Don’t forget forgetting,” we are told. And so here it is, this book of memory that remembers forgetting, an anti-memorial refusing cheap comforts. Khersonsky indicts both enforced remembrance and enforced forgetting, leaving the reader nowhere ‘clean’ to stand. Brought to us in clear, energetic English, Khersonsky’s Ukrainian poems coming to us in this tough moment is a cause of celebration.

    —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa



    Borys Khersonsky (b. 1950) is a Jewish-Ukrainian poet, professor of clinical psychology, and practicing psychiatrist. Under Soviet rule, he was a dissident in Odesa and participated in the samizdat movement, which disseminated alternative, non-conformist literature. He is the author of over thirty books of poetry including Family Archive (2006), Bow to the Tree (2019), and Printout (2020). Having written in Russian for much of his career and held membership in PEN Russia, Khersonsky broke with the Russian literary scene in 2014 amid Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and initiation of war in the Donbas. Since then, he has written in both Ukrainian and Russian to critical acclaim and recognition from the Shevchenko National Prize in literature. His poetry has been translated into over twenty languages. Queen Saturday is his first full-length book in English.


    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. In 2022, Carbon in Ukrainian self-translation was announced as a prize-winner in the international Lviv Literary Prize, The Winged Lion.” Since the onset of the war, Lavochkina has been continuously raising awareness of Ukraine in Germanophone mass media.




    Oksana Rosenblum is a translator and art history researcher based in New York City. She was born and raised in Ukraine but calls NYC her home since 2003. Her poetry translations from Ukrainian, essays, and book reviews appeared in National Translation Month, Versopolis, Ukrainian Weekly, Asymptote, Bracken, and Arrowsmith Press. She co-edited a bilingual volume of the early poetry of Mykola Bazhan, an important and prolific 20th century Ukrainian poet (Academic Studies Press, 2020), translated V. Domotovych’s novel On Shaky Ground (Central University Press, 2024), and co-translated Artem Chekh’s novel Rock, Paper, Grenade (Seven Stories Press, 2025).

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