What is Nina Kossman’s God, and what kind of Unfinished Business are we about to get into, I wondered, opening this book of poems. “History Transformed into Myth,” the subtitle at the front of these pages warned, and I wondered what is history if not already a myth. That’s what I thought, getting started, yes–right before I learned that Kossman sent me these poems from a warzone, literally: the poet’s e-mail said she was in the occupied Ukraine at that time. And just like that, the mythological history, whatever that is, became a documentary fact. Facts take an interesting role in this collection of poems, actually: we begin with an echo of an ancient Akkadian text also taking place in a warzone, though of a very different kind. And, indeed, the myth comes forth. Or, rather, the myth is denied us (“What Ismul’s soul learned in the city of souls is never revealed”) only to be revealed as the pages turn…”
“When the mythological and personal meet, something transforms for this reader; perhaps that very “semblance of meaning in a meaningless world” comes to the surface. What is that meaning, you might ask. Perhaps it is awareness of how one isn’t alone, after all, and has never been alone on this planet, despite what humanity’s so-called “progress” seems so intent to insist on.”
-Ilya Kaminsky
