Product Overview
This collection reflects the developments and effects of the Ukraine War as seen
by Russophone poets from all over the world. Divided into thematic clusters, the
book delves into the death, despair, displacements, and dislocations brought
on by the war, and explores the complexities and conflicts of affiliation with the
language and culture of the country ruled by Putin’s aggressive and repressive
regime. The featured poems were sourced from Kopilka, a repository of current
antiwar poetry.
“In a world where all the answers collapsed in one go,” writes Bakh
Akhmedov, one of the excellent poets in this anthology. Poetry cannot
provide answers to the great issues of war and murder that impel this
book—but these pages do save and then reinvent the Russian language
from which you can form them.
-Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is
Possible, This is Not Propaganda, and How To Win an Information War.
The book resembles an immense destroyed city square; people, standing
infinitely close to each other—and yet their voices so unmistakably unique;
a dignified choir in the dislocated space, one that resists entropy; the
choir that utters and the choir that listens. So, poetry has proved its
ancient point once again: it matters the most when one would think it
should matter the least. This is poetry in its purest sense and translation
at its best.
-Irina Mashinski, author of Naked World and co-editor of The Penguin
Book of Russian Poetry