The poems in Oksana Maksymchuk's debut English-language collection meditate on the changing sense of reality, temporality, mortality, and intimacy in the face of a catastrophic event. While some of the poems were composed in the months preceding the full-scale invasion of the poet's homeland, others emerged in its wake. Navigating between a chronicle, a chorus, and a collage, Still City reflects the lived experiences of liminality, offering different perspectives on the war and its aftermath. The collection engages a wide range of sources, including social media posts, the news reports, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, making sense of the transformations that war affects in individuals, families, and communities. Now ecstatic, now cathartic, these poems shine a light on survival, mourning, and hope through moments of terror and awe.

With The Voices of Babyn Yar—a collection of stirring poems by Marianna Kiyanovska—the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival by projecting their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.