Your Beloved Dogs and Other Animals

Erscheinungsjahr 2027
ISBN: 978-0-674-30910-4
Verlag: Harvard University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 28, 160 Seiten, Format (B × H): 127 mm x 203 mm

Reihe: Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature

your beloved dogs and other animals gathers fifty poems by Bohdana Matiyash, one of Ukraine’s most distinctive contemporary lyric voices. Written with deliberate simplicity and quiet intensity, these poems move through love, loss, companionship, faith, and memory. Animals appear throughout the collection not as decorative figures but as intimate presences—dogs, lions, lambs, and other creatures who open a path toward tenderness, grief, wonder, and emotional truth. Matiyash’s poems dwell in the ordinary: a moment of light, a gesture of care, the nearness of another living being. Yet the ordinary is never merely ordinary. In her work, the everyday and the mystical meet in language that is lucid, restrained, and deeply resonant. Marked by the absence of punctuation and capitalization and shaped by fluid enjambment, Matiyash’s poems invite readers into an open, meditative space. Their apparent simplicity is exacting rather than naïve: each word is chosen with care, allowing familiar words—beautiful, simple, good, bright, joyful—to recover texture, warmth, and force. Presented here both in the original Ukrainian and in Yevheniia Dubrova’s graceful English translation, your beloved dogs and other animals offers a lyrical encounter with contemporary Ukrainian poetry beyond the frame of war. Intimate, contemplative, and quietly luminous, this collection speaks to the fragile bonds that connect humans, animals, and nature, and to the unseen dimensions of daily life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Matiyash, Bohdana

Weitere Mitwirkende

Dubrova, Yevheniia

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Über Autor(innen)

Matiyash, Bohdana
Bohdana Matiyash is a poet, essayist, translator, editor, and literary scholar. Born in Kyiv, she is the author of several poetry collections, including <i>conversations with God</i>. Among other recognitions, she has received the Smoloskyp Literary Prize, the Lesia and Petro Kovaliv Foundation Award, and Poland’s Merit for Polish Culture distinction.

Dubrova, Yevheniia
Yevheniia Dubrova is a writer and literary translator working between Ukrainian and English. Her work has been recognized by the American Translators Association, the de Groot Foundation for Writers, and the Translating Ukraine Summer Institute.