Author: Vasyl Makhno Translator: Olena Jennings Publisher: Plamen Press (2022) Paper Bridge is the first bilingual collection by Ukrainian poet Vasyl Makhno, a “master of the contemporary Ukrainian Ballad, who builds a lifeline for the broken-hearted wanderers, homeless heartbreakers, hopeless romantics, and helpful ironists,” in the words of Valzhyna Mort, winner of the Griffin Poetry prize. Makhno’s bridge extends to us all, serving whatever purpose we need it to, as Lidijia Dimkovska, author of A Spare Life, writes, “it is a bridge that can burn or resist… but it is a witness to the existence of a traveler through souls, bodies, and spirits, through our own subconsciousness.” With this outstanding collection of poems, Makhno is able to preserve an “enviable spiritual equilibrium…one that grinds out the music even in the toughest of days, a music that survived the twentieth century and keeps alive in the new horrors of the twenty-first,” in the words of Los Angeles Book Prize winner Ilya Kaminsky, “and now despite it all, even in his room in New York City away from Ukraine, [Makhno] can still hear how ‘old age sings’ how it ‘nervously forces the music into a rhythm,” and how ‘it might falter, but it plays again.’”
