“This kind of poetry is not about life; it is about being. Chasing the disappearing horizon of time, the poet inhabits the eternal and the evanescent at once.”
The God of Freedom
by Yuliya Musakovska
tr. by Olena Jennings
Yuliya Musakovska reveals, facet by facet, the landscape of a turbulent, contemporary Ukraine. Equal parts intimate and expansive, the poems follow the societal struggles of women and their families, the trauma of returning soldiers, and the peoples’ future under the shadow of war and its tumultuous past. Translated by Musakovska and Olena Jennings, The God of Freedom reveals a moving, devastating, and all too necessary glimpse of Ukraine from one of the country’s most celebrated poets. Vibrant, relevant, and masterful, this volume stands out as a must-read work in translation, full of profound insights and captivating eloquence. With cover art by Anastasiia Starko.
The poems in The God of Freedom rebuke and question, introduce and preserve one of the darkest moments in modern European and global history. Simple images of “wet, clipped fields” transform into “rebellious girls,” and an innocent speaker emerges as “wind that got caught in striped stocking.” Musakovska’s verses hold an entire nation’s historical and current burdens during which each individual is fighting for survival and the right to exist. Dense and surreal, The God of Freedom is a collection readers will not forget.
~Nicole Yurcaba, The Los Angeles Review
Yuliya Musakovska
Yuliya Musakovska is an award-winning Ukrainian poet and translator. She was born in 1982 in Lviv, Ukraine, where she lives and works. She has published five poetry collections in Ukrainian, among them Hunting for Silence (2014), Men, Women, and Children (2015), and The God of Freedom (2021) shortlisted for the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Prize and included in the top eight nominees for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize. She received many literary awards in Ukraine, including the Smoloskyp Prize for Poetry (2010). Her work has been translated into over thirty languages and widely published around the globe. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, AGNI, Tupelo Quarterly, NELLE, The Common, and other journals
Translator:
Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press, 2022) and the chapbook Memory Project. Her novel Temporary Shelter was released in 2021 from Cervena Barva Press. She is a translator of Kateryna Kalytko’s Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don’t Know Anyone (Lost Horse Press, 2022) together with Oksana Lutsyshyna and Vasyl Makhno’s Paper Bridge (Plamen Press, 2022). She was shortlisted for the Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize 2023 for her translations of Yuliya Musakovska’s poetry. She is the founder and curator of Poets of Queens reading series and press.
