“Two archaeologists, young boys, unearth
the skeleton of the wind.
Now it is an exhibit...only the visitors to the National Museum may hear it blow.
...
But one day,
someone will break off a bone of the wind—
a new fire
beneath their jacket.
Someone will smuggle
the wind.”
-”EXHIBIT”
-Letters of the Alphabet Go To War, 2026
More than its visceral images and compelling witness—lines of potent anger and gripping grief met against great resolve in facing untenable violence—Lesyk Panasiuk’s Letters of the Alphabet Go to War, translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky, is a devastating portrait of war and devastation, personally and culturally, made all the more stunning for its fight. The work spares nothing, pulling the reader in close, restored, finally “here [Bucha]” and treading the “a poor copy of my [emphasis added] city,” Panasiuk’s own, carved out and handed to the reader so that they may hold the reality of what was taken (pg. 31). Yet not lost, for while a “copy” it may be, we are returned here, with Panasiuk, and the emotion becomes that more complex as he balances the trauma of what is gone with the innate, average feeling of coming home after so long: and, I remember then, not by choice, and it is made starker.
It is impressive, one of the many sharp aspects of this collection that are, how Panasiuk first, bridges the gap of understanding, fighting with words unfit to bear the breadth of his experience, but trying all the same so that those who hear might understand, and those who understand might not feel so alone, and then Farris and Kaminsky then managing to bridge two tongues in meaning. But what could be asked more from trying to make sense of the indescribable? For degeneration is a key backbone of war, seeking to rip things out from the root, make them forgotten, and though to stand against it may be of the most painful experiences, Panasiuk’s Letters of the Alphabet Go to War does more than succeed. It invites discomfort, leaving the bones bared along the surface of each image, and demanding that the listener not look away. In the afterword, when “invisible remnants of the war linger” far longer than a city is liberated, its ground embossed with “tank tracks—[a] primitive writing” that won’t allow the mind to stray a few “seconds without thinking about the war”, what “any language” could do to contain it (79/31). More so, the arts, a universal tongue to bridge experience:
“How can poetry describe this” (79).
And, much like I might imagine a city rebuilds itself, one of the more potent and memorable lines I remember from the war, President Zelensky saying—“every house, every street, every city ... you [Russia] will repay everything you did to us”—Panasiuk, Farris and Kaminsky, the three break apart what I expected of poetry to reinvent meaning. The lines are contradiction itself, with a calm, familiar rhythm that feels—at times—almost conversational without sparing the ugly truth of what surviving brutality truly looks like, and trusting its reader to comprehend it all, even if it takes time: even when “language in a time of war / can’t be understood” (pg. 9). And this is of my favorite aspects of this collection, where what could be understood—both in what the speaker/poet/translator said directly, violent actions and aggressors of war buring “all the authors who influenced us [Ukranians], fire/coughs on each book we haven’t read or read or planned to read,” but more importantly, and with time, that I could only come to cognize by emotional: the defeated and confused feelings, sitting “back again the wall” after triggering a “mine” left behind in “A SHOE FULL OF WATER,” with “strange excitement” searching for the “best model prosthesis” only for the eyes to open and “lost leg has found the body once more” (29). The image is jarring, nearly as much so as the emotion, this sense of consumer appeal, not resignation but acceptance after loss, only for even that to be ripped from our speaker, “testing its presence...slightly disappointed” (29). Yet, it stands to explain the sheer unexplainability of that experience for someone who has never lived it, when in the next line, we stand within a turn of clarity:
“ I lie there for a long time,
rewinding this dream.
I realize that I am no longer, that I no longer fear
my own mutilation, or even death, a lightness,
unbearable, settles in.
That very day, I buy tickets home.”
-“A SHOE FULL OF WATER” (pg 29)
I love how much of this collection unnerves me. How much of it makes me question the reality of the moment, what is happening, and what it means, because, I mean, the poem begins with “Finally home,” only to find our way about getting there. Maybe it is just that. There is no clean line to unpack it. The confusion, aversion, resolution, and “unbearable lightness” of “no longer fear[ing]” the most terrifying requires, not the expected or ‘logical’ route, but an unraveling of it to find a new way toward comprehending it, and the poetry, Panasiuk’s verse and Farris and Kaminsky’s translation weaves a poignant address to question whether sense has any place at all in the conversation, when the “police van” comes for us regardless of what the signs read because they “don’t understand [the] words, but we can understand the importance of the resilient words: “a new fire / ... smuggle[d] ... beneath their jacket” (51/13/65).