Maksymchuk’s words accrue a mountain of humanity in the ends of inhumanity. Ascend it; peer over language’s walls. Can her poetics actually cross them all?

Ishchenko argues that the burden of the post-Soviet left is debatably its greatest asset: that people remember how it felt to be part of communism’s utopian project, and that before today’s war, a strong plurality of Ukrainians felt ambivalent about, not hostile to, its cause.