Echoes from the Odyssey
By Oksana Maksymchuk
When the air raid’s over
I still hear them: sirens
airing their wings
on the ghostly boulders of buildings
swelling out of the morning mist
War is warm this year, yet
they’re wearing icy armor
each feather frozen —
a cut-throat razor or
a delicate rounded coin
with a protruding spine
Merciless, guiltlessly
unabating, sirens
sing when I close my eyes
stinging them from the inside
with icy quills
Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her
debut English-language poetry collection Still City is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection,
forthcoming with University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). She is also the
author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian. Her poems
appeared in AGNI, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, The Poetry Review, and many other journals. She co-edited an anthology “Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine,” and co-translated several poetry collections. She is a recipient of the National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, and other honors. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. In the recent years, she has been splitting her time between Chicago, Budapest, Warsaw, and her hometown of Lviv, Ukraine. Connect with her on her website www.oksanamaksymchuk.com.
