Furious Harvests

This collection of striking poetry by Alex Averbuch explores the existential questions that war raises from the Russian aggression against Ukraine currently taking place in Averbuch’s home region of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, to the events of World War II. Many poems in Furious Harvests arise from the author’s own experiences observing the effects of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. Through the lens of his Jewish-Ukrainian family history and using poeticized documentary materials related to World War II, Averbuch also writes about the suffering of others who were captured and deported, and who perished in earlier times. In some poems, letters of Ukrainian Ostarbeiters sent to their relatives in Ukraine are interwoven with letters of Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to devastated villages in Ukraine in search of their murdered relatives.

Furious Harvests is both unsettling and liberatory in its de-specification of ethnos, language, and sexuality, reliving trigger-points in Ukraine’s history through the confessional intimacy of family, shame, pleasure, and the reconciliation of self and other.