Translated by olga mikolaivna, Tatiana Retivov, and Anna Shershnyova

Now 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