Overtakelessness: Poems

Moysaenko’s debut collection, winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, takes its title from an Emily Dickinson poem that employed it as a positive spin on death, suggesting a transcendent state thankfully removed from the sorrows of life. But in Moysaenko’s work, it signifies a kind of death-in-life, a state of being erased by history—specifically the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war—while still alive, as loved ones, communities, and indigenous cultures are “dispersed like threads of cream in tea” and remembered only as ghostly remnants found in rubble. Not even nature resists militarization: rain is “like an invasion / of the atmosphere.” In fragmented, imagistic lines as sharp as shrapnel, Moysaenko, a Ukrainian American, personalizes war’s unrelenting erosion of human hope for a better future. He writes, “If you know history, you know barbarism. If you do not know barbarism, then you do not know history.”