Tag: Russia-Ukraine war

Waiting to Exhale: A Q&A with Natalie Oceanheart, author of Life Beyond Fear: A Ukrainian Woman’s Memoir, by Katya Cengel

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Natalie Oceanheart begins Life Beyond Fear: A Ukrainian Woman’s Memoir (Potomac Books) with the escalation of fighting in Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Oceanheart is just starting out her adult life and yet the choices she makes as a daughter, wife, and mother — as well as a recent college graduate — are made amidst the chaos, despair, and danger of war. Born in eastern Ukraine, Oceanheart experienced the war from Russia’s first hybrid attack in 2014, and she backtracks to explain this, as well as the difficult choices she and her nuclear family make as they become internal refugees and then later leave Ukraine. At its core this is a coming-of-age story, which despite the bleakness of the situation offers hope through Oceanheart’s desire to act as a healer. I hold onto that hope as I once held onto the hope I saw while reporting on the protests that led to the Orange Revolution.

— Katya Cengel

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Poetry of Place and Displacement: A Q&A with Natalya Sukhonos by Valerie Bandura

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Natalya Sukhonos’ third collection of poems, Sunlight Trapped in Stone (Green Writers Press, 2026), is an act of witness. At the center of the book are questions about history and place in the face of loss and displacement. Sukhonos was born in Odesa, Ukraine, and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine. The immigrant experience, its practical struggles, and the sense of belonging to multiple communities, languages, and histories is explored in each poem, most poignantly expressed in “Tunnel Vision”: “We’re all intact, but barely.”

Sukhonos introduces us to an intimate album of characters and visceral images: a grandfather reliving the past through Soviet-era movies, the hands of a mother raising her dead child from the crib, old women shelling sunflower seeds in a chestnut-lined courtyard, and the sweetness of apricot ice cream. These poems describe the past as vividly present, passing forward intergenerational trauma as much as creating a historical record.

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A Character with a Secret Is an Easy Sell: A Conversation with Sasha Vasilyuk, by Olga Zilberbourg

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A new novel set in World War II enters a crowded and hotly contested field. It is a particularly remarkable feat for a debut novelist that Sasha Vasilyuk’s Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024) earned universal praise from celebrated writers across the former USSR diaspora community and far beyond. Gary Shteyngart wrote, “Wonderfully written, elegiac and necessary, Sasha Vasilyuk uncovers the history behind the recent headlines with great skill and grace.” Susanne Pari, author of In the Time of Our History and The Fortune Catcher, wrote, “An outstanding novel of sacrifice, love, and forgiveness.”

We celebrate this novel’s arrival with particular pleasure. A contributor to Punctured Lines, Vasilyuk participated in a number of events we’ve hosted over the years, and we’ve heard excerpts from this novel as she was working on one draft after another. In May 2024, Olga Zilberbourg interviewed Vasilyuk during a book release event at Telegraph Hill Books in San Francisco. The following Q&A is a follow-up to that in-person conversation. 

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