Still City

A work of spare, lyric reflections that illuminate the experience of war with surprising impact and universality. Maksymchuk offers the language of war—land mines, bombs, missiles, and human remains—with powerful precision to describe the war in Ukraine while drawing the reader in closely and offering images that cannot be brushed aside.

We are listening to a poet holding on to her wit, her eye, her self-awareness, from within war, witless and brutal.

The 20th century established a strong tradition of central and eastern European poetry in English: many of Maksymchuk’s poems suggest that a new generation has begun to participate in this distinguished tradition.

Using others’ accounts as well as her own, she immerses us in a world where fear and violence seep in to the point where they are startlingly routine: “how normal it all now feels/how boring".

Still City presents page after page of devastating emotional turns and sensory images—finger traps as well as landmines—in astonishingly good poem after astonishingly good poem. The last ten or so are among the most powerful poems I’ve read in ages, if comparisons are even apt...I strongly recommend this book for its humanity and emotional resonance, as well as its clarity on the psychological and physical sufferings of civilians during wartime.

If words could bring a case against war, Oksana Maksymchuk would be a prime witness to call, and Still City—the first lyric collection Maksymchuk has penned in English—the testimony. Maksymchuk’s lines display concision without rush, truth without compression, despite the duress of life during wartime that they chart and that compels them.

Poet, philosopher, anthologist, translator Oksana Maksymchuk is someone whose work I have known and admired for years, and yet nothing prepared me for her new book, Still City. How can one prepare for war? This is precisely the question this poetry makes memorable music of. There is terrifying restraint in these poems of war wherein realism becomes a song, realism becomes hallucination, realism is a naked nerve set to a tune. Terrifying, yes, but necessary. Still City is an important book.

We have needed this book of poems for centuries, for generations; a poet who shatters all the quiet retreat like an alarm clock that will never shut off. Forget the front pages of newspapers causing breakfast paralysis; it’s Oksana Maksymchuk we need to tell us, ‘In the dictionary of victims / there's no space / for a hair to fall.’

In Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City, war is everywhere. It is impending, it arrives, it swallows, infusing every detail of life, and every act of figurative language that can be used in the service of those details. I am grateful for her radical honesty, for her willingness to take me to her homeland, to its lit display cabinets filled with cakes, its candied pinecones, the lushness of its flowers, its classrooms filled with children, so that I can begin to understand the brutality of its violation. She teaches me that life, it turns out, is as tenacious as war.