Still City

Poems

The 20th century established a strong tradition of central and eastern European poetry in English: many of Maksymchuk’s poems suggest that a new generation has begun to participate in this distinguished tradition.
The Guardian

Named as One of Financial Times‘s Best Summer Poetry Books of 2024

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 effects 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.

about the author

Oksana Maksymchuk

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and translator. She is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in the Ukrainian. She coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry, and has published a few single-author volumes of translations. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.

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Oksana Maksymchuk