Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her poetry appeared in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. Her manuscript Tongue Ties was a finalist for Tupelo Press’s Snowbound, Berkshire, and Dorset prizes, and individual poems and translations have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the co-translator of Apricots of Donbas, a collection of selected poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk, and The Voices of Babyn Yar, a book of poems by Marianna Kiyanovska.
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In this advice to a young poem, the speaker praises the resilience and healing qualities of mysterious, elusive, and almost shapeless poetry.
The speaker describes the sounds and movement of bugs, birds, and nature, while waiting for war, as if they were impervious to human events.
