Hutsulka (Poetry)
Author: Nicole Yurcaba
ISBN: 979-8-9896607-4-2
Publisher: River Paw Press
Page Count: 42
Language: English
Worldwide Release: June 2026
Hutsulka, the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize Finalist by Nicole Yurcaba, is a fierce and intimate sequence of odes written in the shadow of Russia-Ukraine war. Rooted in ancestral memory of the author and shaped by present-day events, these poems confront betrayal, displacement, and longing with conviction and unflinching hope.
Nicole Yurcaba’s poems stun with unremitting authenticity and power – a poet’s defiant response to the missiles that continually explode over her beloved ancestral homeland. Relationships fray and dissolve as the dark shadow of Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine looms throughout this unflinching collection of richly textured odes. Its consequences are personal, haunting, heartbreaking: “There is a war/no one but our people remembers. It disappeared/from headlines like youth disappearing from your eyes/on the day a missile struck your university, a museum, a theater sheltering children.”
In this stellar book, identity and inherited grief are both weighty and a call to arms. Immense personal loss is juxtaposed with acts of resilience and poems bear witness to those forgotten, terrorized, killed. And yet amid the darkness lies the enduring strength of ancestral ties and an unwavering sense of self. Hutsulka is magnificent and masterful – intense and intimate.
– Ksenia Rychtycka, author of Sky Full of Wings
“These poems crackle with energy and blaze beacon-bright. Nicole Yurcaba protests complacency and cruelty on both the small scale of individual relationships and the large scale of invasion and war. These are poems of anger and mourning, but they are also full of fierce love despite betrayal.”
–Steven Knepper, Editor, New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry
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