Books
dasein: defence of presence
Yaryna Chornohuz
Yaryna Chornohuz is a poet, translator and a member of the Ukrainian Marines. She was awarded the Taras Shevchenko Prize in 2024 for [dasein: defence of presence]. She has published two further poetry collections and is currently working on a prose work.
Poetry from the front lines of the Russian-Ukrainian war
What does it mean to defend human presence against a genocidal force that intends to destroy it?
Yaryna Chornohuz’s poems are meditations from the front line of this defence. They are acts of testimony to pain and loss in war yet also to the hope that underlies Ukrainian resistance.
Faced with an existential threat, those who choose to fight, paradoxically, have no choice at all. Without defence, there is no freedom nor survival: ‘we have a choice without a choice/ so we’re still free’.
The abstractions of philosophy become a matter of life and death in [dasein]. A belief in the immeasurable value of human lives inspires Yaryna Chornohuz’s military service and poetry alike.
Her poetry is urgent reading for all who are not yet under direct attack by brutal tyranny but who seek to understand what it means to defend individual and collective forms of existence to preserve life and freedom.
We Were Here
Artur Dron
Artur Dron’ is a young poet and a rising star of Ukrainian literature. He served on the front line in the 125th Territorial Defence Brigade from 2022 to 2024. In December 2025, he was awarded the Yuri Shevelyov Prize for Nonfiction for ‘Hemingway Knows Nothing’. Jantar will publish its English translation in September 2026.
Poetry from the front lines of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The poet asks why do we need poetry and answers with poems and a further explanation
For a long time I had no answer to this question. I told myself that I didn’t know. After the full-scale invasion began, I stopped writing. Since the age of seventeen, I had believed that literature was my purpose in life, I thought that being a writer was something that carried weight and had meaning. And suddenly it turned out that there was no meaning at all. What can you write when children are being pulled from under the rubble? In what order do you arrange words to ease the pain? I decided that writing was pointless.
But I was wrong. Time needed to pass because it is impossible to write about today in the old language. It had to be reinvented. I had to lose faith in writing, admit that literature was helpless, begin hating all writers, forget every poem. I had to give up on language completely. And start from the beginning.
Let’s go back to the beginning. Now I have the answer. Why do we need poetry in a time of war? Why do we keep writing these poems, reading them, sharing them with each other like communion wafers or cigarettes? Why do we sometimes need to read something to feel love or even hate more fiercely? Why do we need poems?
To feel less lonely.
