Overtakelessness (Poems)

Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Alberto Ríos

Overtakelessness is a powerful reckoning with war, its ruinous proximity to daily existence and the dissonance of experiencing it from afar. These poems trace the long history and the present circumstance of the ongoing and devastating war in Ukraine, a country whose origins far predate Russia’s, despite Moscow’s propagandist claims. Through the lens of the Ukrainian diaspora witnessing the current violence from America, Daniel Moysaenko attempts to square a centuries-old motherland with a newly aggrieved contemporary nation. A third country emerges in these poems: one that, though spectral, exists in a perpetual future, “astounded at what’s left of living.”

In spare lyrics, prose poems, and ravaged blocks of text, Overtakelessness becomes a book of gaps that haunt the spaces between ancient folktales, lost Soviet records, relatives’ failing memories, nationalist misinformation, and the rhythms of Ukrainian speech. Many of these poems are collages mediated by technology, the news coverage of bombings, the photos of soldiers shared on social media, the time delays of Zooming with family—the war experienced firsthand and by smartphone, “its screen a reflective blank, a sky populated by ghosts.” These gaps and rifts argue, finally, that what cannot be held cannot be seized.

Overtakelessness is a moving and extraordinary debut collection.