Olena Boryshpolets: Orpheus and Eurydice in New Y0rk

About this event

“Don’t Look Back”: A Reading from Orpheus and Eurydice in New York A.D. White House, Guerlac Room November 10, 5PM "When we look back, we become frozen in time, and sent to the death of memory. So goes the story of Orpheus and that haunting journey into the underworld. The pain of memory, the paralysis of witness—this is a visceral experience, and one that is connected to our ongoing timeline of toil, our inevitable human condition. And we watch as the world spins its yarns, its wars, its brutality. For some, this watching is the watching of loss, the watching of destruction. And for others, it is a cultivation: of meaning, of experience, of scenes and breaths of times that remain. The poet whose task is to etch onto today what has occurred and wreaked is a poet who is cursed, inexplicably bound to the journey, capturing endurance over frailty, creative outlet over snub and censure. Olena Boryshpolets’s masterful Orpheus and Eurydice in New York is one such curse, one such journey, one such documentation of the utterly and the awful, a work that is born of trauma and exile, of refuge and solace. It is a book that captures the incredibly ceaseless moments of the Ukrainian survivors who have moved through and through again to new positions and perspectives as a result of the war from Russia. This collection is not easy and is not simplistic: it spans the range of a humanity that has pushed to many brinks, that is in a state of flux, where fringe is survival, and the shadows of the past chapters are indeed underworldly." —Greg Bem for northofoxford