Queen Saturday (Paperback)

Queen Saturday brings English-language readers the unique voice of a poet at large in the unbounded spaces of memory. It is the first bilingual collection of Ukrainian verse by Borys Khersonsky―a post-World War II generation poet, clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, and former Soviet dissident. In these poems, heaven is often the setting: Jews who perished during pogroms and in the Holocaust continue with their daily routines, whereas on earth, displacement has become a constant, and collective memory has been cleansed of the Jewish past. Khersonsky’s lyrical speaker moves through Odesa’s courtyards, Transcarpathian towns, and the scarred mountains of Crimea, closing the distance between vanished streets and imagined afterlives of countless Jewish kin. Ethnic and artistic identities are fractured and distorted in the unrelenting vise of empire―first Russian, then Soviet, and now the colonial violence of Russian aggression in Ukraine. With mordant wit and prophetic clarity, Khersonsky reimagines prayer, anecdote, and historical testimony, charting a topography of survival and loss.

Borys Khersonsky (b. 1950) is a Jewish-Ukrainian poet, professor of clinical psychology, and practicing psychiatrist. Under Soviet rule, he was a dissident in Odesa and participated in the samizdat movement, which disseminated alternative, non-conformist literature. He is the author of over thirty books of poetry. Khersonsky broke with the Russian literary scene in 2014 amid Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and initiation of war in the Donbas. Since then, he has written in both Ukrainian and Russian to critical acclaim.

Svetlana Lavochkina is a Ukrainian-born novelist, poet, literary translator and Waldorf teacher based in Germany since 1999. She writes in English. Her poetry and fiction have been published and translated internationally. Lavochkina was a prize-winner in the 2013 Paris Literary Prize and finalist in the 2015 Tibor & Jones Pageturner Prize. Her verse novel Carbon (Lost Horse Press, 2020) in self-translation was runner-up for the 2022 Krylaty Lev International Lviv Literary Prize. Lavochkina has been translating 20th-century and con-temporary Ukrainian poetry for fifteen years. Her translation of Dmytro Kremin’s poetry collection A Violin from the Other Riverside (Lost Horse Press, 2023) was awarded the 2025 Panteleimon Kulish International Literary-Artistic Prize. Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Lavochkina has been working to raise awareness for Ukraine in German-language mass media and collaborating on interdisciplinary projects, including Shigeru Ban’s Paper Sanctuaries: Pragmatism & Poetry for Ukrainian Refugees for the London Design Biennale 2023.