Today is A Different War
“In the morning, rockets outside the windows/ instead of birds,’ writes Lyudmyla Khersonska in Today is a Different War, her striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Her images will sear themselves in your memory: “Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in....”
The voices assembled here veer from the frightened and disoriented: “I don’t know how to live now./ where, in what direction, for example/ you and I don’t have a bomb shelter, not even a basement,” to the combustible and combative: “Russian invader..../ Fear female revenge and female conspiracy,/ Fear Ukrainian girls, Molotov cocktails in hand....”
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: “so this is it. now it’s you who chooses how to live your life.”
“In the morning, rockets outside the windows/ instead of birds,’ writes Lyudmyla Khersonska in Today is a Different War, her striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Her images will sear themselves in your memory: “Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in....”
The voices assembled here veer from the frightened and disoriented: “I don’t know how to live now./ where, in what direction, for example/ you and I don’t have a bomb shelter, not even a basement,” to the combustible and combative: “Russian invader..../ Fear female revenge and female conspiracy,/ Fear Ukrainian girls, Molotov cocktails in hand....”
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: “so this is it. now it’s you who chooses how to live your life.”
“In the morning, rockets outside the windows/ instead of birds,’ writes Lyudmyla Khersonska in Today is a Different War, her striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Her images will sear themselves in your memory: “Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in....”
The voices assembled here veer from the frightened and disoriented: “I don’t know how to live now./ where, in what direction, for example/ you and I don’t have a bomb shelter, not even a basement,” to the combustible and combative: “Russian invader..../ Fear female revenge and female conspiracy,/ Fear Ukrainian girls, Molotov cocktails in hand....”
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: “so this is it. now it’s you who chooses how to live your life.”
