Still City: A Diary of an Invasion

Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk's debut in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence, drawing on various sources to tell the shared experience of a poet's imagination. It began as a poetic journal in Lviv, Ukraine, in 2021-2022, registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 128 pages
Publication date: 30 May 2024
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2025, Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection 2025, and Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes 2024, Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk's debut in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Inevitably, there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this diary of an invasion recreates the mood and tone of the context within which a poet's imagination must make sense of the change. Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience. The book began as a poetic journal I started keeping in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine, in 2021-2022. In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of time, fate, and personhood.

Weight: 152g
Dimension: 134 x 215 x 12 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800174023