Set Change

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. 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.

About the Author :
Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist. In the mid 1980s, he cofounded the poetical group Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Blaster-Buffoonery), which rebelled against socialist realism and instead promoted a new poetic ethos of aesthetic freedom and the ludic. Widely regarded as one of the most important figures in contemporary Ukrainian literature, he is the recipient of the 2014 Hannah Arendt Prize and the 2016 Goethe Medal. He lives in Ukraine. Ostap Kin is a translator of Ukrainian poetry. He is the editor of New York Elegies- Ukrainian Poems on the City, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Prize for Best Translation, and his cotranslation with John Hennessy of Serhiy Zhadan's A New Orthography was a cowinner of the Derek Walcott Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. John Hennessy is a poetry editor at The Common and the author of two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel and Coney Island Pilgrims. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013, Believer, Harvard Review, and HuffPost. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Review :
"Brilliantly translated by Kin and Hennessy, this captivating collection from Ukrainian poet Andrukhovych is animated by local legend, regional history, and personal recollection....Wide-ranging and representative of Andrukhovych’s many strengths, this is a valuable English-language introduction to an important poet." —Starred Review, Publishers Weekly “These poems . . . offer a rich variety of images and tones, from somber to playful, sincere to sarcastic, as Andrukhovych unites past and present in a wild clash of memories and imagination.” —Noah Slaughter, Full Stop