WINTER KING Format: PB - PAPERBACK

Ostap Slyvynsky’s The Winter King presents a selection from a decade and a half worth of work by one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary voices in poetry. Slyvynsky is the poet of everyday things. He writes of children’s games, old trees, and family stories. Yet what emerges from under his pen is a portrait of an era. His writing, simultaneously delicate and unflinchingly incisive, like a surgeon’s hand, always probes for the bottomless depths gaping behind the mundane. Perhaps the greatest of Slyvynsky’s gifts as a poet is his ability to examine individual voices and memories for traces of larger historical events without ever trivializing the former in the face of the latter. His spare, lean poems unearth a complex and layered human reality that is both universal and strikingly, almost painfully rooted in the landscape that birthed it, be it the poet's family home in the Carpathian mountains or the Maidan square in Kyiv, aflame with revolution. Slyvynsky’s remarkable attention to detail results in strikingly beautiful and enigmatic texts that invite multiple re-readings, each peeling off yet another layer of reality. However, what always remains at the core after these layers are stripped off is the poet's profound humanity. Drawing on three of Slyvynsky’s earlier poetry collections, this volume also includes some of his most recent poems--arguably, among the poet’s best.

Vitaly Chernetsky is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. A native of Odesa, Ukraine, his translations into English include Yuri Andrukhovych’s novels The Moscoviad and Twelve Circles, a volume of Andrukhovych’s selected poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster, Zhdanovka by Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze, and two children’s books by Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv, Sound and Sight.

Iryna Shuvalova is a poet and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine, based in Oslo, Norway, whose poetry has been translated and published internationally. She co-edited Sodom, the first anthology of queer writing in Ukraine, and her most recent book, Stoneorchardwoods was named book of the year by Ukraine’s LitAktsent Prize for Literature and received the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Book Award. She holds a PhD in Slavonic Studies and an MA in Comparative Literature.