Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Ukrainian by Orest Popovych. "From Yehuda Amichai to the New York Group, from the state of the Union to the stables of Gertrude Stein, violins in their cases and pregnant foxes in their lairs: Makhno sweeps through the unreal city of immigrant dreams and resident nightmares and gathers it all into poems at once compassionate, witty, and saturated with life. As thoroughly versed in the antics of Ashbery as in the hijinks of Bukowski, Antonych, Du Fu, Makhno enters the American scene a Ukrainian original, enlarging our field of vision. Bracing, embracing, and utterly valuable. Gottfried Benn was wrong"--Askold Melnyczuk.
About the Author
Vasyl Makhno is a Ukrainian poet, essayist, translator and playwright. He is the author of seven collections of poetry: Skhyma (1993), Caesar's Solitude (1994), The Book of Hills and Hours (1996), The Flipper of the Fish (2002), 38 Poems about New York and Some Other Things (2004), Cornelia Street Cafe: New and Selected Poems (2007), a book of essays The Gertrude Stein Memorial Cultural and Recreation Park (2006), and two plays Coney Island (2006) and Bitch/Beach Generation (2007). He has also translated Zbigniew Herbert's and Janusz Szuber's poetry from Polish into Ukrainian, and edited an anthology of young Ukrainian poets from the 1990s. The poems, essays and plays of Vasyl Makhno have been translated into Polish, English, German, Serbian, Romanian, Slovene, Russian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Czech and Belorussian languages. In recent years in Poland were published two volumes of his selected poems Wedrowcy (Wanderers) (2003), 34 wiersze o Nowym Jorku i nie tylko (34 Poems about New York and Some Other Things) (2005), and in Romania Fiecare obiect isi are locul sau (Every Thing Has Its Place) (2009). Vasyl Makhno was a participant in many International Literary Festivals in Europe, America, and Asia. He has been living in New York since 2000.