What lies at the bottom of Oleh Kotsirev’s bottomless pocket? At first glance: “excise stamps / wine corks / leopard-print corsets / crumpled business cards / faded kisses from yesterday / withered under the sun / tickets to places with unknown names / scraps of other people’s books”. If we reach deeper and look more closely, we will also find touching memories, keen observations of everyday life, aphoristic sentences, linguistic games, surreal pictures – in short, the whole reality will be revealed to us as seen only by a child, transformed as only a poet can transform.

Oleh Kotsarev (born 1981 in Kharkiv) is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, journalist, and translator. He lives in Bucha near Kyiv. His latest books are the poetry collections “Evacuation” (2022, with Polish translations by Aneta Kamińska), “Contents of a Man’s Pocket” (2021), and the novel “People in Nests” (2017). He is co-editor (with Yulia Stakhivska) of the anthology “Ukrainian Avant-garde Poetry (1910-1930)”. Author of many articles and essays, mainly devoted to literature and culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Editor of the almanac of young literature “Znak”. One of the curators of the online magazine of translated poetry “Umbrella”.

Participants: Oleh Kotsarev (online) – author, Aneta Kamińska – translator, moderator: Magda Kicińska, interpreter: Anna Jawdosiuk-Małek