Lightning Meets Water and Wind

Marianna Kiyanovska’s Lightning Meets Water and Wind is a visionary poetic reckoning with Russia’s war against Ukraine and one of the most ambitious works to emerge from contemporary Ukrainian literature.Composed of eighty interconnected poems presented here both in the Ukrainian original and in English translation, the book unfolds as a single polyphonic epic. Voices of the living and the dead, of women, children, refugees, ruins, prayers, and landscapes merge into a chorus that resists both silence and simplification. Refusing linear narrative or confessional lyricism, Kiyanovska creates a poetic language that moves between lament and prophecy, sacred incantation and documentary witness.Written during the full-scale invasion of 2022–2023, the collection transforms the shattered realities of war into a vast mythopoetic landscape where history, memory, grief, and resistance converge. Drawing on traditions ranging from Homer and the Bible to Heraclitus and the Upanishads, Kiyanovska situates the current war within a deeper historical continuum of violence and survival. Yet the poems remain intensely embodied and immediate—filled with blood, breath, disrupted speech, and flashes of revelation. “Lightning governs all,” she writes, invoking poetry itself as a force capable of illuminating catastrophe without reducing it to ideology.Following the internationally acclaimed The Voices of Babyn Yar, this volume confirms Kiyanovska as one of Europe’s major poetic voices. Lightning Meets Water and Wind is at once a work of witness, philosophical inquiry, and artistic resistance—a profound meditation on language and humanity in a time of war.