About this item
Highlights
- Today is a Different War is Lyudmyla Khersonska's striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine.
- Author(s): Lyudmyla Khersonska
- 54 Pages
- Poetry, Russian + Former Soviet Union
Description
About the Book
Today is a Different War is Lyudmyla Khersonska's striking volume of poems portraying life from inside war-torn Ukraine.
Book Synopsis
Today is a Different War is Lyudmyla Khersonska's striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Masterfully translated into English by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman, no other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what's in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems.
Review Quotes
"Globally, Ukrainian poets are establishing Ukrainian poetry as a decolonization mechanism within a global literature canon traditionally dominated by Russian literature. In turn, these poets establish poetry as means of preservation for documenting the daily challenges and brutality of life during wartime. In Lyudmyla Khersonska's Today Is a Different War, readers encounter a speaker attuned to and in love with the living world and able to document the war's destruction because of their connection with their surroundings."
-Nicole Yurcaba World Literature TodayIn these electrifying poems by Lyudmyla Khersonska, a door booms, "don't open" to war, stacks of books block missiles, and the poet warns Russian invaders to "[f]ear female revenge and female conspiracy, // Fear Ukrainian girls, Molotov cocktails in hand//Fear our women, above all in this strange foreign land." Women breathe, watch, wait, rhyme, cry, buy rhododendrons, paint their nails, taunt the war, and live days and nights of the infuriating threat of violence. Khersonska makes poems at once mortal and eternal, battle cries and records of war, that "weird, alien creature." This work resists an enemy that "wants to destroy us" with language as varied as human experience, musical, metrical, true: "Dot. Dash. Shock." - Rachel DeWoskinAuthor of Big Girl Small