This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you might find distasteful. —Oksana Zabuzhko
“Language, any language,” observed the young poet Oksana Zabuzhko, “is the capital love of my life” because “nothing else has the power to synthesize music and myth, two things without which the world would be a totally unlivable place.” It’s a credo to which Zabuzhko has remained faithful across time, even as the young poet evolved into the mature fiction writer, polemicist, and activist who is without doubt the most influential literary figure in Ukraine in the last half century.
“You’re not really a woman,” reads the epigraph to Zabuzhko’s Clytemnestra, immediately underscoring three central aspects of the poet’s work. First, she’s an inheritor of the Western literary tradition, grounding many of her poems in…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, September/October 2020