Still City: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Maksymchuk, Oksana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822967359 ISBN 13: 9780822967354

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

Synopsis

Longlist, The 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize | Longlist, 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry | One of Financial Times's Best Summer Poetry Books of 2024

The poems in Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut English-language collection meditate on the changing sense of reality, temporality, mortality, and intimacy in the face of a catastrophic event. While some of the poems were composed in the months preceding the full-scale invasion of the poet’s homeland, others emerged in its wake. Navigating between a chronicle, a chorus, and a collage, Still City reflects the lived experiences of liminality, offering different perspectives on the war and its aftermath. The collection engages a wide range of sources, including social media posts, the news reports, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, making sense of the transformations that war effects in individuals, families, and communities. Now ecstatic, now cathartic, these poems shine a light on survival, mourning, and hope through moments of terror and awe.

About this title

About the Author

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and translator. She is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in the Ukrainian. She coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry, and has published a few single-author volumes of translations. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Still City: Poems by Oksana Maksymchuk

INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP

I bought a hat
of faux mink fur
to wear in the war

In my hat I sit
in my cellar
waiting

The enemy’s late
I read his messages
on my phone

popping open
jars of strawberry jam
lining the cellar walls

Like a lover
my enemy sends me
flowers, emojis, words

of condolence
supplications, doctored
screenshots, explicit photos

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822967359
• ISBN 13: 9780822967354
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136