Overtakelessness by Daniel Moysaenko

Overtakelessness won the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. It’s a stunning debut collection. Moysaenko uses the poetic line and fragmentation to deliver a complex, broken, but completely relatable witness of war in the speaker’s distant ancestral land. The speaker’s forgetting and losing of an inherited culture and language are mirrored in the destruction in that Ukrainian homeland. The poems are specific, detailed, and human. Buy here.

From “Catalogue Raisonné (Vol. 1)

My great-grandmother’s recipes are forested with her handwritten notes: “until warm,” “a pinch,” “dollop,” “fleck.” A memory like topsoil scattered in the grass, radiating dark opal. Flake of salt on the tongue. Hands passing a spoon of wheat berry around the table until it arrives back at her.

The summer long, land shimmering Easing from dew to full sun to shade. The recipe for cold beet soup changing each time told since the writing fades each year, past watercolor tea stain to mist.

So the recipe is photographed in emergency, its leaves pinned as pleats in an opera gown. Ferried from apartment to apartment. Taken out of its shoebox at night to be spread, rustling, on the table. And to watch its glow take over the room. Like new air. Like sustenance. Which it is.

From “Missing in Action in Donetsk Oblast, August 2014”

. . . Six years she’s been letting go

of terror

One mortar shell at a time

but picking up another

Face broached in the mirror

ripe as a plum

kept in a box of holiday lights

Shaken with abandon

Nothing intimate as your shirt

folded like a letter in her drawer

From “The Last Miracle”

. . . No accident of ownership in the mold spores

in his knapsack eating through

a grapefruit’s peel and pith to membrane

While he walks home past the rail yard

Molotov cocktails explode against freight cars

and sprinkle their confetti over him . . .