Still City
A Diary of an Invasion
Scaglione Prize 2023
American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize 2023
"Still City" includes some ninety poems. They register the changing sense of time, mortality, and responsibility in a world at war and reflect on the private and communal experiences of living in circumstances of extreme and unpredictable transformation. Inevitably, there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this Diary of an Invasion recreates the mood, tone, and valence of the context within which a poet's imagination must make sense of the change. Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience. The book began "as a poetic diary I started keeping while living in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine in 2021-22. In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of time, fate, and personhood".
American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize 2023
"Still City" includes some ninety poems. They register the changing sense of time, mortality, and responsibility in a world at war and reflect on the private and communal experiences of living in circumstances of extreme and unpredictable transformation. Inevitably, there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this Diary of an Invasion recreates the mood, tone, and valence of the context within which a poet's imagination must make sense of the change. Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience. The book began "as a poetic diary I started keeping while living in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine in 2021-22. In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of time, fate, and personhood".
About the author
Oksana Maksymchuk was born in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1982. She is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, "Xenia" and "Lovy", in the Ukrainian, as well as a co-editor of "Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine", an anthology of contemporary poetry. Her English-language poems appeared in The Irish Times, The London Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry London, PN Review, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. Oksana was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and a winner of Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association of America, Peterson Translated Book Award, American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, Richmond Lattimore Prize, and Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize. She holds a PhD in ancient philosophy from Northwestern University. In the recent years, Oksana has been dividing her time between her home in Lviv and various visiting appointments in the United States and Europe.