Book Release — Furious Harvests by Alex Averbuch
Another remarkable bilingual poetry collection has been released by HURI Books: Furious Harvests by Alex Averbuch, translated with an introduction by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky.
Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. The book is available in print (paperback and hardcover), ebook, and online rental formats.
About the Book
At first glance, Furious Harvests may be accepted as vulnerable, confessional, and liminally sincere. Yet Averbuch uses this intimacy to raise broader questions—origin and bloodlines, fate and free will, self-knowledge and autonomy. One of the most compelling aspects of these poems is their exploration of how the self comes into being: from rubble and debris, shaped—almost against gravity—into something that appears seamless and coherent.
Alongside autobiographical poems, Furious Harvests incorporates archival-based poetry: letters written by victims of pogroms, ethnic cleansings, population exchanges, the Holodomor, and forced deportations. Among them are the voices of Ukrainian Ostarbeiters—people forcibly taken to work in German factories, fields, and farms during World War II—as well as Jewish Holocaust survivors.
Composed on multiple linguistic registers and languages, imperfect spelling, agrammatism, and the dialectal nuances of handwritten messages, Furious Harvests serves as a powerful reminder of a past our predecessors tried to distance themselves from, yet one that continues to shape our collective memory and lived experience. The collection moves toward a fragile reconciliation between self and others.
About the Author
Alex Averbuch was born in 1985 in Novoaidar, a small settlement in Luhansk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, which has been under Russian occupation since March 2022. He is a scholar, literary historian, poet, and translator. His research explores intercultural and transepochal phenomena in Eastern European and Jewish literatures and cultures from the eighteenth century to the present, with a particular focus on Ukraine.
His work on queerness, ethno-gendered otherization, postcolonial and decolonial studies, propaganda, totalitarianism, visual and material cultures, and epistolarity has appeared in leading journals in Slavic and Jewish studies, including Slavic and East European Journal, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Krytyka, AJS Review, East European Jewish Affairs, Russian Review, and Russian Literature. He is also the co-editor of Postal Censorship, Surveillance, Resistance: Twentieth-Century Ukraine and Letter Writing.
Averbuch is the author of several poetry collections, over one hundred works of creative writing, and more than sixty literary translations from Ukrainian, Hebrew, Russian, and English. His poems have appeared in English translation in journals such as Beloit, The Manhattan Review, Copper Nickel, Birmingham Poetry Review, Plume, Words Without Borders, Sugar House Review, Constellations, and Common Knowledge, as well as in anthologies in Italian, French, Hebrew, Finnish, Estonian, and Polish. His work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His book Zhydivs’kyi korol’ (The Jewish King) was a finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest honor in culture and literature.
How to Survive What Has Already Happened
where are You
the root of the answer is silent
it does not yet have any being
to discern
the star of Jacob
which illuminates
with an unborn speech
your boundless touch
in the rift of
gestures thoughts
a shadow passes and a cloud floats
and dust like a fleeting dream
and seeps
with prayers—a worn out heart
like a celestial seed, like the dust of the earth
like a well of water
like an embarrassed force
like slashes of fire
in the dark of your presence