Hero image

Poetry Reading of Still City: Diary of an Invasion by Oksana Maksymchuk

26 Nov 2024

In Gallery, Event


 

Address:

Open Eye Gallery
19 Mann Island
L3 1BP Liverpool

Open:

6 – 8 pm

Share

Event image

26 November / 6 – 8 pm / Open Eye Gallery / free, drop-in

Join us for the reading of Still City, the debut English-language collection from a Ukrainian poet reflecting on her experiences of the invasion of her homeland, followed by Q&A with the author, Oksana Maksymchuk!

The discussion will be hosted by Dr Pauline Rowe.

Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Inevitably, there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this diary of an invasion recreates the mood and tone of the context within which a poet’s imagination must make sense of the change.

Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience. The book began ‘as a poetic journal I started keeping in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine in 2021–22. In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of time, fate, and personhood.’ 

Oksana Maksymchuk was born in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1982. She is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian, as well as a co-editor of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry. Her English-language poems appeared in The Irish Times, The London Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry London, PN Review, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. Oksana was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and a winner of Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association of America, Peterson Translated Book Award, American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, Richmond Lattimore Prize, and Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize. She holds a PhD in ancient philosophy from Northwestern University. In recent years, Oksana has been dividing her time between her home in Lviv and various visiting appointments in the United States and Europe. 

Dr Pauline Rowe is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and has 9 poetry publications. She is currently running the RLF Reading Round project at Open Eye Gallery and is Writer-in-Residence for the People of Anfield project. She was the first writer-in-residence at Open Eye Gallery (2016 – 2019) and was former Poet-in-Residence for Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust (2013 – 2020).

Image: Still City book cover

 

Address:

Open Eye Gallery
19 Mann Island
L3 1BP Liverpool

Open:

6 – 8 pm

Share

 

Join our mailing list

News, Exhibitions, Opportunities and more.