Oleh Lysheha is considered the "poets' poet" of contemporary Ukraine. A dissident and iconoclast, he was forbidden to publish in the Soviet Union from 1972 to 1988. Since then, his reputation has steadily grown to legendary proportions. His work is informed by transcendentalism and Zen-like introspection, with meditations on the essence of the human experience and man's place in nature. James Brasfield studied poetry and translation with Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Daniel Halpern, and other luminaries. He served as an editorial assistant for poetry at "The Paris Review," and now teaches...

In James Brasfield's Ledger of Crossroads, layered by light and shadow, the crossroads emerge from distinct yet inseparable geographies. Grounded in the sensual world, the poems fuse American and Eastern European landscapes: "the char of silence and beauty, / brick foundations of what was here, dirt roads / cut through pines, rivers and the dust of the dead." Here are experiences from the American South, of those who believed Jim Crow "the way things... had to be," and from the fallen imperiums of those "who have always / returned to fewer trees and a wall," whose intimate perceptions...