Slyvynsky, Ostap: The Winter King

Lost Horse Press, paperback Publication Date: January 1, 2023 Publisher Marketing: The Winter King by Ostap Slyvynsky presents a selection from a decade and a half worth of work by one of Ukraine's most prominent contemporary voices in poetry. Slyvynsky is the poet of everyday things. He writes of children's games, old trees, and family stories. Yet, what emerges from under his pen is a portrait of an era. His writing, simultaneously delicate and unflinchingly incisive, like a surgeon's hand, always probes for the bottomless depths gaping behind the mundane. Perhaps the greatest of Slyvynsky's gifts as a poet is his ability to examine individual voices and memories for traces of larger historical events without ever trivializing the former in the face of the latter. His spare, lean poems unearth a complex and layered human reality that is both universal and strikingly, almost painfully rooted in the landscape that birthed it, be it the poet's family home in the Carpathian mountains or