Still City

Scaglione Prize 2023American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize 2023"Still City" includes some ninety poems. They register the changing sense of time, mortality, and responsibility in a world at war and reflect on the private and communal experiences of living in circumstances of extreme and unpredictable transformation. Inevitably, there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this Diary of an Invasion recreates the mood, tone, and valence of the context within which a poet's imagination must make sense of the change. Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience. The book began "as a poetic diary I started keeping while living in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine in 2021-22. In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of time, fate, and personhood".