“...the most important contemporary female author in independent Ukraine...”
Selected Poems
by Oksana Zabuzhko
A woman on a bus traversing the American midwest, Clytemnestra plotting her husband’s murder, Ophelia criticizing her creator, and a report from Chernobyl all offer the poet occasions for reflections marked by a sophisticated wit and a philosophical probing reminiscent of Wislawa Szymborska or Adam Zagajewski. By turns urgent and ironic, Zabuzhko’s poetry stands alongside the finest and most important work to emerge from Europe in the last half century.
Oksana Zabuzhko
Novelist, poet, and philosopher, Oksana Zabuzhko is one of Ukraine’s best known and most important public intellectuals. Her controversial novel, Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, is widely regarded as a contemporary classic and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her most recent novel, Museum of Abandoned Secrets, explores the untold stories of Soviet life in the second half of the twentieth century. Zabuzhko has been a Fulbright scholar, and has taught Ukrainian literature at Penn State, Pittsburgh University, and Harvard. Her book Notre-dame d’Ukraine is a cultural study focused on the work of the fin-de-siecle writer Lesia Ukrainka. Founding editor of Komora Publishers, she works at the Hryhori Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine.
