Product Overview
This collection focuses on the war between Russia and Ukraine 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, as well as the determination and hope of the people who stand for freedom and against Putin’s aggressive and repressive regime. The writing is poignant, beautiful, and, in many cases, mordantly funny. This poetry both reflects and participates in a language and a literary culture that are riven by civilizational conflicts. 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