Set Change
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The first comprehensive English-language collection of one of the most important voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, a collection of poems about the region's history of violence as seen through geography, myth, and city life.
Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukrainian writers, the author of a body of work that ranges from the novel to the essay to poetry and that stands out in every genre for being thoughtful, playful, free-spirited, and astonishingly new. His career took off in the waning years of the Soviet Union, when underground artists and writers and the rumbles of rock music coming from abroad all helped to bring the walls of the sclerotic Communist empire tumbling down.
Set Change draws on the poetry Andrukhovych wrote in the eighties and nineties, before he turned his attention to prose. The collection shows him beginning on a quest to represent and do justice to Ukraine's long history of violence. He explores the overlapping and shifting borders of Eastern Europe while also venturing into realms of fantasy and myth. Again and again, he returns to the idea of the city as a space of carnivalesque disguise and discovery. Drawing on the rich resources of Ukrainian literature, from the amplitude of the baroque to the austerely powerful configurations of the lost modernist generation, Andrukhovych's poems are ironic and elegiac, witty and allusive, lyrical, experimental, and political. As translated into English by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, they offer readers a powerfully transformative vision of the place of poetry in a fractured world.
This bilingual edition includes the original Ukrainian versions of each poem.
Yuri Andrukhovych
Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. His book-length works translated into English include the novels Recreations, The Moscoviad, Perverzion, and Twelve Rings, as well as a collection of essays My Final Territory. He lives in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. Vitaly Chernetsky is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures and director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization and coeditor of Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. Ostap Kin is the editor of New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poetry on the City. Kin lives in Brooklyn, New York.
More by Yuri Andrukhovych
Ostap Kin
Translated by
Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City. He translated (with John Hennessy) Yuri Andrukhovych's Set Change, the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and Serhiy Zhadan's A New Orthography, and (with Vitaly Chernetsky) Yuri An-drukhovych's Songs for a Dead Rooster. His work appears in the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues. He is pursuing a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures at Stanford University.
John Hennessy
Translated by
John Hennessy is the author of two previous collections, Coney Island Pilgrims and Bridge and Tunnel, and his poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2024, The New Republic, Poetry, The Yale Review, and more. With Ostap Kin he is the translator of Serhiy Zhadan's award-winning A New Orthography, the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond , and Yuri Andrukhovych's Set Change. Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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