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Left Bank Books Presents: Oksana Maksymchuk
in conversation with Lauris Veips, a poet and translator from Latvia
March 2 @ 4:30 pm
This reading will be held in-person at Left Bank Books, and also streamed live to Left Bank Book’s YouTube page.
Join us for a reading and conversation with Oksana Maksymchuk, an award-winning bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and translator.
Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City: Diary of an Invasion (Pittsburgh University Press/Carcanet) offers an immersive chronicle of war, originating in the months leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Maksymchuk will be in conversation with Lauris Veips, a poet and translator from Latvia.
EVENT INFO
- Books available from Left Bank Books
- Curbside pick-up, in-store pick-up, and shipping available
- RSVP is encouraged
ABOUT THE BOOK
STILL CITY: DIARY OF AN INVASION
Named as One of Financial Times‘s Best Summer Poetry Books of 2024, the poems in Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut English-language collection meditate on the changing sense of reality, temporality, mortality, and intimacy in the face of a catastrophic event. While some of the poems were composed in the months preceding the full-scale invasion of the poet’s homeland, others emerged in its wake. Navigating between a chronicle, a chorus, and a collage, Still City reflects the lived experiences of liminality, offering different perspectives on the war and its aftermath. The collection engages a wide range of sources, including social media posts, the news reports, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, making sense of the transformations that war effects in individuals, families, and communities. Now ecstatic, now cathartic, these poems shine a light on survival, mourning, and hope through moments of terror and awe.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK is a bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and translator. She is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in the Ukrainian. She coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry, and has published a few single-author volumes of translations. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.
LAURIS VEIPS is a poet and translator from Latvia. His debut poetry collection, Interesting Days, was nominated for the Annual Latvian Literature Award in 2021. His translations into Latvian include works by Archilochus, Anne Carson, John Donne, and the evening’s guest Oksana Maksymchuk. Lauris is a 2nd-year PhD student in the Comparative Literature and Thought program at Washington University in St. Louis.
PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
