Boris Khersonsky is widely regarded as one of Ukraine’s most prominent Russian-language poets. Khersonsky was born in 1950 in Chernivtsi and spent most of his life in Odessa, Ukraine, where he practiced medicine at a psychiatric hospital and taught psychology at Odessa National University. In Soviet times, Khersonsky was a part of the samizdat movement, which disseminated nonconformist literature. After the fall of the USSR, he published many books of poetry, which have been translated all over the world. His poems have appeared in theAtlantic and Modern Poetry in Translation.