Set Change

The first comprehensive English-language collection of one of the most important voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, a collection of poems about the region’s history of violence as seen through geography, myth, and city life.

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukrainian writers, the author of a body of work that ranges from the novel to the essay to poetry and that stands out in every genre for being thoughtful, playful, free-spirited, and astonishingly new. His career took off in the waning years of the Soviet Union, when underground artists and writers and the rumbles of rock music coming from abroad all helped to bring the walls of the sclerotic Communist empire tumbling down.

Set Change draws on the poetry Andrukhovych wrote in the eighties and nineties, before he turned his attention to prose. The collection shows him beginning on a quest to represent and do justice to Ukraine’s long history of violence. He explores the overlapping and shifting borders of Eastern Europe while also venturing into realms of fantasy and myth. Again and again, he returns to the idea of the city as a space of carnivalesque disguise and discovery. Drawing on the rich resources of Ukrainian literature, from the amplitude of the baroque to the austerely powerful configurations of the lost modernist generation, Andrukhovych’s poems are ironic and elegiac, witty and allusive, lyrical, experimental, and political. As translated into English by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, they offer readers a powerfully transformative vision of the place of poetry in a fractured world.

Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist who is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary Ukrainian literature. He primarily wrote poetry in the early stages of his career and founded the poetical group The Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Blaster-Buffoonery). This contribution has led people to credit him with breathing new life into Ukrainian poetry in the mid-1980s. He later turned to prose writing, with his works receiving translations into twenty-two languages. He has received an assortment of national and international awards for his contributions as a writer, intellectual, and cultural theorist, which include the Herder Prize (2001), the Hannah Arendt Prize (2014), and the Goethe Medal (2016).

Ostap Kin is an award-winning translator of Ukranian poetry. He is the editor of New York Elegies: Ukranian Poems on the City, winner of the American Association for Ukranian Studies Prize for Best Translation, and has co-translated numerous books with his collaborator John Hennessy, such as Baby Yar: Ukranian Poets Respond and Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography.

John Hennessy is a poetry editor at The Common and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts. He has collaborated with Kin to translate A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and Baby Yar: Ukranian Poets Respond. Hennessy has also published two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel and Coney Island Pilgrims, and his fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.