Episode

Alex Averbuch, "Furious Harvests" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Podcast
The Harvard Brief
Published
May 22, 2026
Duration seconds
2895
Processing state
not_requested
Canonical source
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK8607336316.mp3
Audio
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK8607336316.mp3
JSON
/v1/public/podcasts/the-harvard-brief-7065267/episodes/alex-averbuch-furious-harvests-harvard-up-2026
Markdown
/podcast/the-harvard-brief-7065267/alex-averbuch-furious-harvests-harvard-up-2026.md

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Summary

Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2026) transports readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of a grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other. Alex Averbuch is assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and culture in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics.