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Editor’s Welcome
before being conscripted into the Soviet army. After his
military service he worked for various newspapers and
publishers and published his first book
We Carry Love to
the Planet
in 1967. He was arrested in 1979 and spent a
four-year term in Soviet prison camps and after that in
Soviet psychiatric hospitals where authorities tried to
break his health and spirit with psychotropic drugs.
He was released in 1986, the day after the Chernobyl
disaster After a long break, his next book
Prince of the
Dew
appeared in 1990, the year before Ukrainian
independence. Here we’re presenting 11 poems from
him previously unavailable in English.
6
Poet, prose writer and essayist,
Maria Matios
(Марія
Матіос, born 1959) has authored more than twenty books.
Her novel
Hardly Ever Otherwise
appeared with Glagoslav
Publishers in 2012 in Yuri Tkach’s English translation. I
would compare Maria Matios’ masterpiece
Sweet Darusya
– generously excerpted in this issue – to the novels of
Toni Morrison or Alice Walker in American literature. Like
these two prominent African-American authors, Matios
embraces her own family roots, to give voice to the past and