Letters of the Alphabet Go to War

“Lesyk Panasiuk's chilling "In the Hospital Rooms of My Country,: in a tense, crackling translation by Kaminsky and Katie Farris, observes a language passing through extreme violence: ‘The language in a time of war / can't be understood. Inside this sentence / is a hole—no one wants to die—no one / speaks.’"

—Uilleam Blacker, The Times Literary Supplement

“If war involves a fracturing of language, it is poetry that will eventually creep in to fill the gaps... Lesyk Panasiuk has produced poetry that embodies the idea of the rupture of language through the physical collapse of signs and lettering on buildings hit by missiles.”

—Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian

“‘Letters of the alphabet go to war,’ Lesyk Panasiuk reports; in the Ukrainian alphabet, he finds a beloved graphic landscape and a perilous materiality: ‘Through the broken window of / the letter д other countries watch how the letter i / loses its head, how the roof of the letter м / falls through.’”

—Christopher Spade, Poetry Foundation