This collection of poems transforms the personal author’s loss into Ukraine’s collective experience. Since the outbreak of war in Donetsk in 2014, Iya Kiva has become an essential voice for the country’s internally displaced people, creating new metaphors for uncertainty and survival.

Originally writing in Russian, Kiva now writes in Ukrainian, reflecting her linguistic shift and her layered Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish heritage. Her work confronts the trauma of war while offering lyrical expressions of resilience, love, and hope for a united Ukraine.

This book symbolizes the responses of Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods to the tragic events of the Jewish massacres at Babyn Yar in September 1941. It is first presented here in the original and in English translation by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin.

Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond aim to create a language capable of expressing the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust, as well as other peoples murdered at the site.

Poetry from the frontline of the russo-Ukrainian war. Artur asks why we need poetry and answers with poems and a further explanation.

‘For a long time I had no answer to this question. I told myself that I didn’t know. After the full-scale invasion began, I stopped writing. Since the age of seventeen, I had believed that literature was my purpose in life, I thought that being a writer was something that carried weight and hadmeaning. And suddenly it turned out that there was no meaning at all. What can you write when children are being pulled from under the rubble? In what order do you arrange words to ease the pain? I decided that writing was pointless.
But I was wrong. Time needed to pass because it is impossible to write about today in the old language. It had to be reinvented. I had to lose faith in writing, admit that literature was helpless, begin hating all writers, forget every poem. I had to give up on language completely. And start from the beginning.

Let’s go back to the beginning. Now I have the answer. Why do we need poetry in a time of war? Why do we keep writing these poems, reading them, sharing them with each other like communion wafers or cigarettes? Why do we sometimes need to read something to feel love or even hate more fiercely? Why do we need poems?

To feel less lonely.’

In this heartfelt collection of poems, Marianna Kiyanovska honors Holocaust victims by telling their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. The poems share the experiences of ordinary people facing the unbearable events that led to the Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv, using a first-person, captivating, and sometimes alienating approach.

Conceived as a tribute to those who fell, the book raises complex questions about memory, responsibility, and how we remember those who witnessed evil that borders on the unspeakable.