Description

Stanislav Belsky

Translated by olga mikolaivna, Tatiana Retivov, and Anna Shershnyova

There Won’t Be a Culmination

ISBN: 9781956921571 (pbk.)

(Shipping March 10, 2026)

This collection brings together Ukrainian poet Stanislav Belsky’s wartime and pre-war poems. While his wartime work acutely represents the human experience of being stuck in place during these illogical, suspended and isolated times, the prewar poems are prescient and aware of the building tension and portents of what is to come. Unlike many Ukrainian poets after Russia’s invasion, Belsky continues to write in Russian, as a form of resistance against unquestioned nationalism, insisting on a multilingual Ukraine; Russian, after all, is his mother tongue.

In his poems both before and since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Stanislav Belsky is a master of minimalism, his short forms registering and bearing witness to the everyday. His poetry is “an insidiously expanding/conspiracy against the eternal,” a space for soberly encountering reality and “enumerating a list of the dead/like a rusted bathtub.” Tatiana Retivov, Anna Shershnyova, and olga mikolaivna carefully guide the Anglophone reader through the ever-present siren wailing and the “grinding of discourse,” re-presenting these texts in their stark precision.

—Venya Gushchin

In this collection, Stanislav Belsky has written poems that reflects the polyphonic day-to-day of wartime Kyiv. The language of air-alarm apps merge with neighborhood chats, news reports, and conversations on the street. olga mikolaivna has rendered them into stunning works in English, which capture Belsky’s unique poetic style and document the experience of war for English-language readers.

—Amelia Glaser

What happens to the calm observer in the face of ceaseless rocket fire? Stanislav Belsky has spent years writing poems that constitute “arguments with opponents of silence.” This book sees him facing opponents of a different order; the experiences of wartime test his commitments to solitude and unhurried contemplation. And still, even as these poems admit (and absorb) the cacophony of war, they continue to steadfastly slow time, compel concentration: the bombs fall, but “I stay put on the bench with books and glasses.” The crystalline, careful translations by Tatiana Retivov and Anna Shershnyova, and olga mikolaivna hew closely to Belsky’s precise and minimalist compositions.

—Ainsley Morse