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.