HAUS FÜR POESIE

In Tagebuch einer Invasion (Diary of an Invasion, Edition Lyrik Kabinett with Hanser 2025, German translation: Matthias Kniep), Oksana Maksymchuk provides us with the chronicle of an announced war that then actually takes place. She describes the days of agonizing anticipation, in which the question “Are they here yet?" becomes a refrain. “The enemy’s late / I read his messages / on my phone”, it says at one point. And: “Googling the daily news / for the number of troops / gathered at the border". Then follow the weeks, months, and years of certainty, in which the emergency bag and the tourniquet become one’s most precious possessions. These are years of “supplication in the ruins”, of “transfer of knowledge under the occupation", but also years of survivor’s guilt, in which scattered messages arrive from relatives and friends: “My cousin writes / she’s in a cellar / with her one-year-old / her husband mobilised". Maksymchuk finds a laconic, precise language for what we inadequately refer to as “horror”. “what the rocket has in common / with the room full of children / is its current location"..At the same time, there are again and again wholly unexpected insights: “What I didn’t suspect about / war is that there’d be / music". Tagebuch einer Invasion was celebrated by critics and appears on this year’s list of recommended poetry titles.

Svetlana Lavochkina’s long poem Carbon (Voland & Quist 2024, German translation: Diana Feuerbach) is a wild love story between a blacksmith and a linguist, set against the backdrop of the impending war in the Donbas. It begins in Donetsk, the center of the coal mining region in eastern Ukraine; it begins with the futile dream of a mayor who would like to add a rose to the hammer-and-heap emblem on the city’s coat of arms. In a world of spoil heaps and dwarf volcanoes, steaming from the birth of coal, the sensitive Alexander grows up with girl-slender feet in the shadow of Cat Eye Pit. After various adventures—in which a testicle is lost, an entrance examination at the polytechnic is passed, and a prison sentence is served—Alexander encounters Lisa, who grew up apart from the miners’ children. Before this happens, however, she has her own adventures to face. She, the language-obsessed one, who loves words and in particular falls for English (“it rained with the sounds of new wealth"), escapes, among other things, a serial killer and follows a suicide sect to the rim of a volcanic crater. All of this is told at a rapid pace and in wonderfully unprudish, at times even ribald fashion, saturated with myth and full of premonitions of wars to come.

Moderation Irina Bondas

Music Roman Yusipey

The event will be held in English.

Funded by: Bezirksamt Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Lyrik-Empfehlungen 2026, Österreichisches Kulturforum