Queen Saturday

Queen Saturday brings English-language readers the unique voice of a poet at large in the unbounded spaces of memory. It is the first bilingual collection of Ukrainian verse by Borys Khersonsky—a post-World War II generation poet, clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, and former Soviet dissident. In these poems, heaven is often the setting: Jews who perished during pogroms and in the Holocaust continue with their daily routines, whereas on earth, displacement has become a constant, and collective memory has been cleansed of the Jewish past. Khersonsky's lyrical speaker moves through Odesa's courtyards, Transcarpathian towns, and the scarred mountains of Crimea, closing the distance between vanished streets and imagined afterlives of countless Jewish kin. Ethnic and artistic identities are fractured and distorted in the unrelenting vise of empire—first Russian, then Soviet, and now the colonial violence of Russian aggression in Ukraine. With mordant wit and prophetic clarity, Khersonsky reimagines prayer, anecdote, and historical testimony, charting a topography of survival and loss.