When the Air Held Its Breath — on the Poetic Record of War in Oksana Maksymchuk’s ‘Still City’
by Anya Avrutsky
Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City begins not with an explosion but with a pause. In Maksymchuk’s hands, war arrives slowly—through silence, tension, and the surreal disorientation of a city holding its breath.
The 2024 collection of war-time poetry, reflects on history, memory, and the psychic residues of war. Written in the few months leading up to and following Russia’s full-scale invasion, the book bridges a documentary and surrealist style, capturing a city on the brink. Maksymchuk, a Ukrainian poet and translator from Lviv, began writing Still City six months before February 24th, from a building overlooking an old prison courtyard where political prisoners had been executed during WWII. Such a setting serves as a reminder of how little time has passed since the last war that ravaged Ukraine. Maksymchuk was born in Lviv in 1982, she grew up in Ukraine until her family moved to Illinois when she was fifteen.
Over the years, she has gained recognition for both her translations and her own poetry, writing in Ukrainian and English. She sees herself more as a conservator than a creator. She describes writing as “pulling gently on a fully formed poem,” likening it to restoring an existing artwork without altering its details. I was first introduced to her works during her poetry reading at the University of Michigan, held to commemorate the three years since the full-scale invasion. The event featured a powerful reading and thought-provoking conversation between Maksymchuk and Alex Averbuch about the role of poets in times of war and whether her work serves as a testimony to this time.
Maksymchuk’s collection features 87 poems of varying length written in English. The poems themselves are not chronologically ordered, yet as I read through them one by one, they managed to paint a clear picture of the experiences of Ukrainians living during this tumultuous time. A sense of inevitability permeates the book’s early poems, which often end in suspension rather than resolution. However, one is never left wondering what is left out at the end of her poems. Even in the poems written before the 24th of February, it is clear what unspoken conclusion is approaching, that it is the same one that occurs repeatedly throughout history.
In one poem she writes, “Awaiting its arrival I bide my time… Are they here yet?” Although she does not elaborate on who “they” are, she builds on the same tension that most Ukrainians (rather unwillingly) felt. As Maksymchuk recounted the story about the old prison courtyard where she began writing these poems, she reflected that “if it has happened before it can happen again.” Repetition becomes a subtle method of omission, implying what is deliberately left unsaid at each poem’s end. Her poetry reminds us how history collides with the present, exposing how little has truly changed.
Maksymchuk’s poetry resists fixed setting or linear resolution. Rather than shaping her poems for an audience, she simply writes what is already emotionally true. Questions about legitimacy or authority come later. From the outset, the invasion was a spectacle, streamed on TikTok and Telegram. In one poem she writes “I don’t know if the images of bombings are what you yearn for in your feed.” She then wonders if she would want to “unsee” these horrors that she hasn’t earned. This imagery contributed to feelings of survivor’s guilt and poetic illegitimacy. Her public position on this is that she is “not a war poet,” however poetry written about Ukraine cannot be free from the war and its consequences. Still City approaches this trauma through abstraction, while still preserving the documentary-like genre.
Rather than adopting a journalistic tone, Maksymchuk leans into surrealism, crafting poems that draw on lived experiences without claiming them directly. In Still City, what is documented is not always literal, but it is authentically true. Abstraction allows her to navigate the ethics of trauma without appropriating it. Maksymchuk transforms grief into art—much like Marianna Kiyanovska’s The Voices of Babyn Yar, where Kiyanovska speaks for the dead. Kiyanovska’s work faced criticism for poeticizing the experiences of the dead without having “earned” it.
This reflects feelings of illegitimacy by people who are relatively further from the front than those they write about. Despite this, Maksymchuk appears unconcerned about any negative reception of her poetry, as she does not see it as something inherently untrue. Her resistance to factuality gives her the freedom to document trauma without directly claiming it as her own. This surrealist trend is increasingly present among contemporary poets, many of whom watch violence from a distance. Maksymchuk also joins a lineage of poets—Paul Celan, Ilya Kaminsky, and Halyna Kruk—who write not just about war, but from within its long shadow. Like them, she prioritizes emotional truth over clarity, preserving the psychic aftershocks of war.
Still City also takes on a documentary-like genre, unintentionally capturing the final moments before the invasion with quiet intensity. Like the 1939 Polish film Włóczęgi, a relic of pre-occupation Lviv, the collection captures a city not yet shattered, but already shifting in anticipation. Maksymchuk threads fact through abstraction, distancing herself from personal testimony while remaining grounded in collective reality. By ordering her poems non-chronologically she manages to blur time and collapse boundaries between inner and outer worlds, mirroring the uncertainty of wartime existence.
By favoring texture over plot, she portrays not just what happened, but what it felt like as it happened. Still City is not merely a war record but a meditation on consciousness under threat. Through abstraction and mourning, Maksymchuk asserts poetry as both artistic expression and historical witness. Even without resolution, her poems insist on memory and especially endurance. The title of her collection implies stillness but her poetry is anything but that. In her collection nothing is stable or constant, and anticipation looms over every poem. Still City is still a city—but not so still anymore.
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