Overview

KS started writing Kyivsky Waltz in 2014, at the start of Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity (a.k.a. the Maidan Revolution), to answer the question she was asked more and more as the invasion grew into the monstrosity it has become: why did she love Ukraine so much? Kyivsky Waltz is a hybrid chapbook that uses poetry and artwork to tell the story of how KS experienced Ukraine from 1994 to 1996: arriving at 22, alone, completely lost and unable to communicate, yet somehow managing to find a home and people to love in a new nation with an old history. All of the author's proceeds will be donated to Razom, a nonprofit organization committed to raising funds for Ukrainian humanitarian aid.

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Reviews

"Kyivsky Waltz/Київський Вальс is both timely and timeless. Through a masterful interweaving of poems, typeset, and images, this chapbook takes the reader on a lyrical journey through Kyiv in the 1990s, as experienced by a perceptive and heartbreakingly honest young American woman. We hear the ""small symphonies"" and ""rumbling bursts"" of the Ukrainian language. We taste the ""tang of a morning's kiss/mushrooms misted with earth."" We smell the roses and lilacs below a lovers' room. With a poet-journalist's attentive eye, KS Lack infuses her story with everyday detail, always through an intensely personal lens-full of yearning, tenderness, pain, confusion, repulsion, pleasure, beauty, and, ultimately, love. The evocative images of this love story will haunt your memory long after you put it down. -Nicole Svobodny, Senior Lecturer in Global Studies, Washington University in St. Louis Kyivsky Waltz/Київський Вальс leads us through the steps of a transformation, the one that inevitably occurs in the encounter of a foreign place, and of its inhabitants and culture. The poems, demonstrating how small details or words can carry greater significance, convey a journey from disorienting estrangement, to intimate understanding, and love. Through various poetic movements, KS Lack chronicles a dance, at the end of which, two foreigners can say ""But here nothing is yours or mine-just ours."" With this heartfelt collection, Lack reminds us that love, like language, is a pas de deux. -Beatrice Szymkowiak, author of B/RDS A mixture of visually-laden poetry and equally breathtaking artwork, Kyivsky Waltz/Київський Вальс by KS Lack takes you on a sensual, metaphorical, and emotional journey of the seasons -Jason Masino, author of Sinner's Prayer"

Author Information

KS Lack is a writer and letterpress artist interested in the interplay between presswork and poetry and in transcending constraints by working with them. Her work has appeared in various publications and galleries including Proteus Gowanus, Main Street Arts, The Center for Book Arts, Eastern Iowa Press, Red Flag Poetry, The Clemente, and Inverted Syntax. She is a founding member of the Introspective Collective consortium of artists. A native New Yorker, KS received degrees in Post-Soviet Studies from Columbia University (B.A.) and the London School of Economics (M.Sc.) She has been living with chronic pain and disability since childhood. From 1994 to 1996, KS Lack lived in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she helped start Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (The Mirror Weekly), one of Ukraine's first independent newspapers.

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