Babyn Yar

Remind[s] the reading public of not only the necessity of remembering history and taking a stand against evil, but also about the necessity of poetry as witness during a time of great atrocity. -- Nicole Yurcaba * New Eastern Europe *
A welcome addition to the library on Ukrainian literature, history, and modern society. While its primary audience is scholars of Ukrainian and Slavic literatures, it is also highly relevant to anyone seeking to understand the Holocaust and World War II, as well as the existential problem of extreme human cruelty, such as that observed in Ukraine at present. -- Martin Paulsen * Ab Imperio *
Kin’s is the first and only collection to date to focus exclusively on Ukrainian-language poems…the inclusion of poems from distinct literary traditions and historical epochs offers valuable avenues towards our understanding of this complex topic. By bringing these horrendous events into the public eye, the poems’ heartbreaking insights thus offer reflections on the massacre and its ongoing significance, an act of memorialization within a changing political landscape in which an unresolved past remains. -- Hazel Frankel * Holocaust and Genocide Studies *
Temporally and stylistically expansive, Babyn Yar keeps company with other recent poetry that confronts the costs of war and genocide: Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Monica Sok’s A Nail the Evening Hangs On, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. Each poetic work catalogs grief intimately in the aftermath of political violence. That the Russia–Ukraine War is ongoing at the time of this writing infuses the anthology with a terrible urgency. -- Kathryn Savage * World Literature Today *
The Ukrainian-language poetry on the Shoah, and here specifically on Babyn Yar, has largely passed under the radar. The present publication is a major rectification of this omission…The poems in Ostap Kin’s anthology bear eloquent testimony to the results of Nazi genocidal ideology and highlight once more the necessity both of critical thinking in the fight against antisemitism in all its current globalized forms and of the commemoration of the victims of antisemitism’s deadly consequences. -- Gary D. Mole * Eastern European Holocaust Studies *