Nothing To Write Home About

If our lives in the war/ don't seem real / it's because they are not, Oksana Maksymchuk writes in this searing and tender book, wherein poems address the disquieting industry of survival, having to do with such things as retrieving apricot jam from a ruin and picking flowers/for a mass grave. Out of cratered memory and uprooted imagination, in the fields of aftermath and ongoing horror, she has invented something altogether new: the geolocational lyric, assigning mourning /a fixed location/ on Google maps. We are offered "Techniques for Staying Calm During an Air Raid," and the invention of A small radio to communicate/ with the dead—unusually useful information as the world moves toward the precipice of the future. By turns philosophical, erotic, and wrenching, these poems arrive in a moment of urgent necessity.
Carolyn Forché

A momentous achievement. Nothing to Write Home About is a transfixing, unflinching record of persisting to choose language in the face of a war-torn numbness. Maksymchuk's voice is philosophical, yet never rhetorical; restrained yet overflowing with the intense clarity of the everyday. Measured and concentrated, yet fueled by a sensual desire as fierce as life itself, this collection delivers that arresting thrill, the startling spark that we recognize as real poetry.
Valzhyna Mort

Life does not seem real in war, Oksana Maksymchuk tells us, and neither does home. Yet in this world there is nothing more real than this state of the unreal. “Nothing,” as the title of the book tells us, is a subject. Nothing is language and it is madness. It is, in these poems, the act of trying to breathe and speak amid massacre and occupation. It is the digital map that empties our lives and languages. And somehow, as Maksymchuk writes, there is “this thorny matter of surviving.” Nothing to Write Home About subtly attends to the most unsubtle details of war. It’s a powerful achievement, a document of what remains in the cities that no longer exist.
Daniel Borzutzky