Letters of the Alphabet Go to War by Lesyk Panasiuk Reviewed by H. L. Hix

Letters of the Alphabet Go to War by Lesyk Panasiuk

Reviewed by H. L. Hix

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2026

ISBN: 978-1-956046-67-0
Pages: 90

War With Language, War Against Language

by H. L. Hix

“In the Hospital Rooms of My Country,” the first poem in Ukrainian poet Lesyk Panasiuk’s Letters of the Alphabet Go to War, has at its center (and has as its center) this truth: “The language in a time of war / can’t be understood.”  For those of us whose first language is English, Panasiuk’s sentence convenes a chorus of corroborating witnesses, such as Wilfred Owen chastising those who impose war on others, catching them in “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori,” and Toni Morrison issuing her cautionary that “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence.”

Panasiuk’s observation resonates also with an insight Ostap Slyvynsky articulates in the Foreword to his compilation A Ukrainian Dictionary of War: “war not only fundamentally changes the lives of those it has befallen, but it also changes the meanings of words, and they should be defined anew.”  The ways they change vary: some, Slyvynsky says, “become blunt and have to be sharpened, like a knife against stone.  Others, on the contrary, become so sharp that you could cut yourself on them.  Some words wither and fall like autumn leaves.  Others emerge from some half-forgotten past, grow in meaning, and become important.”  Language cannot adequately represent the devastation war rains down on human lives, but the havoc war wreaks on language testifies to that devastation.

That central declaration, “The language in a time of war / can’t be understood,” itself is the moment of greatest distance in Panasiuk’s poem, the panorama given by the camera’s having risen up far enough above the action to see its whole sweep.  But the camera has risen up from a closer view and it returns to a closer view.  The poem (and with it the book) begins on the ground:

Letters of the alphabet go to war

clinging to one another, standing up, forming 

words no one wants to shout, sentences that are blown 

by the mines in the avenues, stories

shelled by multiple rocket launches.

This is not Liberty leading the people, flourishing a gun in one hand and a flag in the other, striding before her valiant compatriots as all charge boldly toward the eternal victory of justice over oppression.  This is one wounded casualty of war leaning on another because otherwise either would fall.  This is naked nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc screaming in agony and terror as napalm burns her.  This is not war glorified, vindicated by victory and gain, but war in its gruesome ruinous destruction and murder, not merely devoid of meaning but inimical to it.

To this closer view the poem returns in its last stanza, not saying but showing that whatever power or capital or territory war accumulates for its few profiteers, for everyone else it creates excess, and it creates everyone else excess.  War is itself much too much, and it makes much too much.  In the poem’s terms, “There is too much alphabet / in the hospital rooms of my country, / too much, too much alphabet.”

The problematic, though, is not only that war is too much and makes too much, but also that in war too much is not enough.  In this, add to the chorus of corroborators not only English-language voices and voices of other Ukrainians, but also Gazan voices and the voices of Panasiuk’s translators.  Palestinian writer Wasim Said addresses the complicated too-much-ness and not-enough-ness of language in wartime by insisting that “I don’t need your sympathy, I need a conscience that hasn’t rotted … a human that hasn’t turned to stone, I need a reader who won’t just close the book and sigh – then go to sip their coffee.”  His words resonate with those of Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky, Panasiuk’s translators, in their Afterword.  “How,” they ask, “can any language, Ukrainian or English, bear witness as a country is bombarded while the world watches?”

While he was in the trenches in WWI, Wittgenstein protested that “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”  In his bombed-out home city, Panasiuk laments that the limitations of his language mean the limits of his world.  As in the opening lines of “A Wartime Dream”:

Emptiness lives inside a radio 

and newspapers are now printed without letters.

I walk up the street

but I don’t—do I?—hear my own steps.

I notice an acquaintance across the street,

and call out to him to say hello, but 

bullets of silence fly from my mouth.

If I can’t speak with my acquaintance, being across the street from him makes me isolated from him, far away, rather than connected to him and nearby, as I would be if we could speak.  Which makes me isolated even from myself, unsure whether I am hearing my own steps.

If Letters of the Alphabet Go to War gives early on an orienting observation, that “The language in a time of war / can’t be understood,” it offers near its end a disorienting question.

(constantly asking each other 

Maybe there’s nothing to be afraid of 

Maybe we’ve been dead for a long time 

Maybe there’s nothing to be afraid of) 

Are we small lightbulbs trembling under the table?

That war is too much and makes too much, and that in war too much is not enough, exposes war as a generator not of surplus value but of surplus devaluation.  And of surplus irreality, to which Panasiuk’s poems give, in Farris’s and Kaminsky’s words, “surreal—no, not surreal; it is too real—documentary testimony.”

When Farris and Kaminsky end their Afterword with two definitions of “a poem,” they mean Panasiuk’s poetry especially.  Let me conclude by honoring their conclusion: “A poem is what one whispers to oneself in a bomb shelter, in order to go on. A poem is a brick hurled at a helicopter.”

H. L. Hix’s recent books include a “testamentary” lamenting persons killed by gun violence, American Outrage; a “sayings gospel,” Teacher’s Teachings; and a lyric narrative, Beckoned Back by Hell-Bent Blackbirds.

Lesyk Panasiuk is a Ukrainian poet, translator, artist, and designer, and a member of PEN Ukraine. He is the author of six poetry collections (in Ukrainian). His poetry has been translated into over thirty languages. In English, his poems have appeared in translations by Ilya Kaminsky & Katie Farris, Valzhyna Mort, Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler & Reilly Costigan-Humes, Alex Averbuch, Daryna Gladun, Taras Malkovych, and Victoria Feschuk. Together with Daryna Gladun, he translated into Ukrainian the poetry collections Epidemic of Roses by Valzhyna Mort and Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky. He is also one of the first Ukrainian translators of Louise Glück’s poetry. Panasiuk is a laureate of numerous literary and art contests and a recipient of fellowships from the President of Ukraine, the International Writers’ and Translators’ House in Ventspils, House of Europe, Staromiejski House of Culture in Warsaw, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, Dartmouth College, Literary Colloquium Berlin, PEN Ukraine, Translatorium, and the University of Alberta.

12 August 2026