Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. She has published two poetry collections in Ukrainian, Xenia and Lovy, and received the Ihor-Bohdan Antonych and Smoloskyp prizes, two of Ukraine’s top awards for younger poets. Her debut English-language poetry collection, Still City, was published by University of Pittsburgh Press and Carcanet Press. She co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry, and has translated full-length collections by Alex Averbuch, Marianna Kiyanovska, and Lyuba Yakimchuk. Maksymchuk’s poems have appeared in The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, PN Review, The Poetry Review, among others. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. Most recently, she was a visiting writer in residence at the University of Chicago, University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and the Cheuse Center for International Writers.
Selected poems
by Oksana Maksymchuk
A poet on the other side
of the war
writes: brothers and sisters fly up
into immortality
Was it years or days ago
that we read our poems
in an underground gallery
surrounded by feminist art
to an audience of teenagers?
Drunk on wine
by the fountain in City Square
we laughed so hard
that a window opened
and a woman in a nightgown
shook both her fists at us!
Time to go, poetesses
you said, and we shared a kiss
that could land us in prison
in Mordovia
Now we each have a cellar
in which to hide
from bombs & aerial strikes
I wonder what supplies
you stocked up on
Are they the same as mine?
On your Facebook profile
a slogan: ‘Motherland is
everything, everything else is —
Nothing’
I scroll through your timeline, popping open
the jar of jam I’d been saving for
a rainy day
a gift from your hometown
no longer a place but
a name
on a map, a ridge of rubble
Copyright © 2024, Oksana Maksymchuk, Still City, University of Pittsburgh Press