Kyivsky Waltz | Київський вальс a love story | історія кохання by KS Lack | КШ Лек

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