New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City (Ukrainian Studies)

Product Description

New York Elegies attempts to demonstrate how descriptions and evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout its development. The collection thus gives readers the opportunity to view New York through various poetic and stylistic lenses. Ukrainian poets connected themselves to a powerful myth of New York, the myth of urban modernity and problematic vitality. The city of exiles and outsiders sees itself reflected in the mirror that newcomers and exiles created. By adding new voices and layers to this amalgam, it is possible to observe the expanded picture of this worldly poetic city.

Review

“Ukrainians are coming! Ukrainians are coming! Actually they have been here all along. What good luck to have this comprehensive, all-embracing anthology, ranging from 20th century classics of Ukrainian poetry to our own contemporaries.

The incredible gift of this book is the chance to see ourselves through the eyes of poets of a different tradition. We have oft en been changed by observing how artists from other traditions see us. Here, too, one thinks of Lorka’s Poet in New York as one reads: ‘like blood / coming / out of vein / the car / tumbles along / the concrete.’

Here is the New York City we know nothing about―and yet it tells us so much about ourselves in ‘the canyons of the city,’ where ‘the brownstones / breathe fish and garlic / on each other.’

As a reader, I am especially grateful to Ostap Kin for his superior introduction and excellent selections of poems herein. It is the book that offers us many discoveries.” ―Ilya Kaminsky, author of
Deaf Republic and
Dancing in Odessa

About the Author

Ostap Kin is an archivist and literary researcher. He co-translated The Maidan After Hours (2017), a chapbook by Vasyl Lozynsky and Songs for a Dead Rooster (forthcoming with Lost Horse Press), a collection of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych.