Apricots of Donbas

Lyuba Yakimchuk is an award-winning author of poetry, short stories, and screenplays. Oksana Maksymchuk is author of two collections of poetry, Xenia and Catch. Max Rosochinsky is a scholar, translator, and poet from Simferopol, Crimea. With Maksymchuk, he coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Svetlana Lavochkina is a novelist, poet, and translator, and her latest novel in verse is Carbon.

Apricots of Donbas is a bilingual collection by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine's industrial east, Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014 when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees. Reflecting her complex emotional experiences, Yakimchuk's poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of childlike babbling about the tools and toys of military combat. Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk's voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems' artfulness go hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.