Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper
“I’m lucky my parents were peasants”
I’m lucky my parents were peasants
sturdy stock and stout bones
had they been like me, they wouldn’t have made it
had they been like me, I wouldn’t be here
on roads where ashes roil with dust
where bodies bloom in the rain
where the dead blossom of youth
froze for days, and for a few hours
no one was old,
the world was all wounded youths
why did my grandparents survive, why?
was it because they felt the burden of generations
of the unborn, of those to come
in five, in thirty, in fifty years?
. . . and those who died, they were like
pruned branches, light and free
. . . and only on my father’s side
the cancer of legacy
women’s tears like women’s fists
proud heads which always fall first
these were women unused to standing for long
because the veins on their legs exploded
who were unable to weep long hours
without going blind, or mad
you had to know how to do everything
tend wounds bake bread dig trenches
nobody taught them
they had to learn for themselves
and they wrote poems—not like before
shorter now, nearly wordless
because they no longer had metaphors
only the clay and the sun
Oksana Lutsyshyn, a Ukrainian writer and poet, is the author of several books of fiction and four books of poetry. A chapbook of poems in English translation is forthcoming from Arrowsmith Press this fall. She is lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. (updated 8/2019)
Askold Melnyczuk—the founding editor of AGNI, for which he received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing—is the author of four novels and a book of stories. What Is Told (Faber, 1994), was the first commercially published work of fiction in English to highlight the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times Notable. Other novels have been selected as a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. His most recent book is a collection of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow. His selected poems, The Venus of Odesa, is forthcoming from Mad Hat in summer 2025. A book of selected nonfiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Still Matters (More than Ever), will be published by Harvard University Press in 2026. He has edited a book of essays on the St. Lucian Nobel Prize–winning poet Derek Walcott and is coeditor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers from the 1980s generation. He's the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award for fiction, the Heldt Prize for translation, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his work in the literary community. Individual poems, stories, essays, and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Also the founder of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, and Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. (updated 5/2025)
Oksana Lutsyshyn, a Ukrainian writer and poet, is the author of several books of fiction and four books of poetry. A chapbook of poems in English translation is forthcoming from Arrowsmith Press this fall. She is lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. (updated 8/2019)