Queen Saturday
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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
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
Translated by
Svetlana Lavochkina is a Ukrainian-born novelist, poet, and translator. She has lived in Germany since 1999. Her work has been published world-wide. Her novella, Dam Duchess, was chosen runner-up in the Paris Literary Prize. Her novel Zap was shortlisted for Tibor & Jones Pageturner Prize, London. Both books in German translation were published by Voland & Quist to national critical acclaim. Lavochkina's verse novel, Carbon, was published in 2020 by Lost Horse Press, USA. In 2022, Carbon in Ukrainian self-translation was announced as a prize-winner in the international Lviv Literary Prize, The Winged Lion.
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