Lesyk Panasiuk’s Letters of the Alphabet Go to War (Sarabande, 2026) drops readers into the center of daily life under Russian aggression.
These poems present readers with the chillingly cruel ways the Russian military targets Ukrainian civilians and illuminate the identity war that’s occurring amidst the mines, air raids, and home invasions.
Here, Panasiuk directly pinpoints the total erasure that Russia strives for in Ukraine––not just the success of a special military operation––but the complete destruction of Ukrainian lives, culture, and, especially, language.
The collection is a response to Ukrainian Panasiuk’s experience living in an active war zone in Bucha, Ukraine during the onslaught of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February of 2022. Translated into English by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, anglophone readers are asked to consider, in Kaminsky’s afterword, “[h]ow can any language, Ukrainian or English, bear witness as a country is bombarded while the world watches?”
This new translation places the Ukrainian and English editions of the poems side by side, drawing specific attention to the usage of language in this collection, which preserves and showcases Panasiuk’s original Ukrainian, rather than replacing it. This choice feels inherently political, a typographical representation of the importance of preserving the Ukrainian language on the page as Panasiuk explicates Russia’s attempted genocide.
In “In the Hospital Rooms of My Country,” he writes, “[t]he language in a time of war / can’t be understood.” Emblematic of the collection as a whole, the poems translate the incomprehensible experience of existential erasure into language.
This consideration of language, its closeness to physical violence, appears from the first poem in the collection, “In the Hospital Rooms of My Country,” in which Panasiuk casts the letters of the Ukrainian alphabet into the warzone. These letters are “clinging to one another, standing up, forming / words no one wants to shout.” Here, Panasiuk portrays the physical violence through the letters themselves, defined by the shape of each character:
By the hospital bed of the letter й
lies a prosthesis it’s too shy to use.
You can see light
through the clumsily sewn-up holes
of the letter ф.
The letters themselves are taking on the injuries suffered by Ukrainians at the hands of Russian aggressors, evoking both the physical and the cultural horror of Russia’s war. We see the letters’ pain––“the soft sign had its tongue torn out / due to disagreements regarding / the etymology of torture”––just like Ukrainian civilians experience in these war zones. The letters demonstrate how Russian violence targets the entire Ukrainian culture. The alphabet becomes a symbol for the Ukrainian language, literature, and history of existing and persisting under new manifestations of Russian oppression throughout time.
Panasiuk’s poems live in the war zone, and the speaker embodies the reality of Russia’s targeted attacks intimately in the ways news reportage cannot: by relying on graphic domestic images which evoke this large-scale violence in the mundanity of daily life. A poem found later in the collection titled, “A Shoe Full of Water: A Diary of Return” blurs the line between reality and dreadful imagination as a coping mechanism:
Finally home: I step into the apartment and detonate a
small mine in the hallway.
(Our neighbors found a mine
left behind in their house slippers.)
Later, the speaker excitedly likens buying new prosthesis to “buying a new bicycle” before realizing the loss a few lines later: “[m]y lost leg has found my body / once more.” We, too, experience the juxtaposition of mutilation and excitement, of safety and disappointment, making it clear that the mindset of war is not a logical or literal one, and not one that can be easily understood by an outsider.
In this poem, Panasiuk also showcases the toll that Russian violence takes on physical spaces: neighborhood homes, buildings, streets, and parks. We see stark flashes of, “shot-up poles, traffic lights, and street signs,” and we enter the speaker’s home, “a starry sky riddled with glowing holes. Cosmic, and bitter.” There is nowhere to look to find a reprieve from the thought of the war. The violence is ever-present and comes to define the speaker’s every action: “I step over this mess as if all our things were puddles / and I am afraid of getting a shoe full of water.”
The attacks on civilians feel intimately violent, giving readers an understanding of Russia’s cultural violences. In, “Our Faces, Tossed About this Land,” the writer straddles the line between real and figurative while he portrays Russian soldiers destroying tokens of Ukrainian culture. Notably, these tokens include books found in civilian homes. Panasiuk writes:
Explain this poem a soldier asks
while our neighbors are slaughtered.
Asks our neighbors to explain a line break
while our children
are without food in a basement.
Readers must face images of Russian soldiers burning Ukrainian books, using their combustibility to light a stove. As these texts are being destroyed, Panasiuk shows us how the “fire / coughs on each book we haven’t read / or read or planned to read.”
Panasiuk’s literary focus is a critical part of his depiction of the war, especially for Ukrainian readers at home and in the diaspora. The explicit use of the Ukrainian language to render its attempted erasure situates Panasiuk in a long line of literary ancestors who have utilized the language for similar purposes. Ukrainian readers, like myself, know that this language has been in peril many times before, and we recognize this war as one of many anti-Ukrainianization efforts waged by Russia throughout history.
Panasiuk’s act of documenting this cultural violence through his writing is a powerful one. But his inscription of the violence onto Ukrainian writing, onto the letters of the language themselves, magnifies that documentation in a way only poetry or literature can. The letters of this alphabet evolve into a living, breathing symbol of the Ukrainian cause. They are the lifeblood of Ukraine––its history, its culture, and all of the relationships that hinge on their existence. A destruction of the language is a destruction of the people, and vice versa. Letters of the Alphabet Go to War is staunch in its insistence that Ukraine will persist and emerge from this latest extermination attempt at Russia’s hand, just as it has done throughout its history.
The afterword, written by Kaminsky, provides the important factual context of Panasiuk’s experiences in Ukraine after the poems. By delaying these disclosures, the poetry speaks first, immersing us in the warzone and grounding us in a poetic perspective of the experience. While the afterword answers any questions we may have after reading, its position allows us to feel the horror of not knowing, of being able to only comprehend what’s right in front of us. As Kaminsky describes, “[t]his song is a silent scream, yes, but also an elegy. It is a protest, but also a love letter to his country.”
Malina Infante is a second-year MFA Candidate in Poetry and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a B.A. in English: Creative Writing and Educational Studies from Denison University. Currently, she teaches introductory rhetoric and creative writing courses at the university level and is interested in comparative literature and poetry in translation. Outside of her coursework, she works as an Editorial Assistant for Ninth Letter.
