Overview

This collection of striking poetry by Alex Averbuch explores the existential questions that war raises from the Russian aggression against Ukraine currently taking place in Averbuch's home region of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, to the events of World War II. Many poems in Furious Harvests arise from the author's own experiences observing the effects of Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine. Through the lens of his Jewish-Ukrainian family history and using poeticized documentary materials related to World War II, Averbuch also writes about the suffering of others who were captured and deported, and who perished in earlier times. In some poems, letters of Ukrainian Ostarbeiters sent to their relatives in Ukraine are interwoven with letters of Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to devastated villages in Ukraine in search of their murdered relatives. Furious Harvests is both unsettling and liberatory in its de-specification of ethnos, language, and sexuality, reliving trigger-points in Ukraine's history through the confessional intimacy of family, shame, pleasure, and the reconciliation of self and other.

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9780674301054

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Reviews

[This book is] an exercise in genetic and historical stoicism, of poetic invincibility. -- Svetlana Lavochkina * European Review of Books *

[This book is] an exercise in genetic and historical stoicism, of poetic invincibility.--Svetlana Lavochkina ""European Review of Books"" (12/19/2022 12:00:00 AM)

Author Information

Alex Averbuch is Assistant Professor of Ukrainian literature and collegiate fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of the collection The Jewish King, a finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award for culture and literature. English translations of his poems have appeared in Manhattan Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit, Birmingham Poetry Review, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. With Max Rosochinsky, she won the first place in the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions and was awarded a National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship. For the translation of Marianna Kiyanovska’sThe Voices of Babyn Yar (2022), Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky were awarded the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the Peterson Translated Book Award, and the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Translation Prize. Max Rosochinsky is a poet, scholar, and translator. With Oksana Maksymchuk, he co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and co-translated Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk, and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska. Their award-winning work has been supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Fulbright Scholar Program, and others.

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