Overtakelessness: Poems

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

Review Quotes:

"In fragmented, imagistic lines as sharp as shrapnel, Moysaenko, a Ukrainian American, personalizes war's unrelenting erosion of human hope for a better future. . . . Like the poets Ilya Kaminsky and Mosab Abu Toha, Moysaenko writes of current realities with an urgency and candor that demand attention."--Library Journal, starred review

"Through a compassionate gaze and precise language, the poet shapes the unspeakable, creating not only a chronicle of a nation's suffering but a testament to its strength. This is a vital, urgent work that ensures Ukraine's story is heard in every line, each word a pulse in the larger, undying heart of its people."--Alberto Ríos

"What happens to storytelling when storytellers are exploded along with their cities? I am grateful to these poems for their refusal to take the easy path of shock value reportage and their willingness to dwell in the silences, and with the silences. Overtakelessness is an important debut."--Ilya Kaminsky

"In his bold debut, Daniel Moysaenko forges a razor-sharp balance between the diasporic experience haunted by the cacophony of Ukrainian war stories seeking to be told and the limits of poetic witnessing and imagining from a distance. Harnessing poetry's capacity for intervention and reclamation through formal and tonal daring, Overtakelessness is inquiring, urgent, and intense."--Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected