In Pursuit of Poetry

Daniel Moysaenko ’16MFA had just gotten home from work when his phone buzzed with a text message from poet Ricardo Maldonado, the then-president of the Academy of American Poets. Moysaenko remembers his mind casting about for an explanation—“I think I know what this is about, but that can’t possibly be true.” He’d submitted the manuscript of his first book of poems for one of the organization’s prestigious annual awards, which comes with publication, a cash prize, and a writing residency in Italy. Distinguished poet and professor Alberto Ríos was serving as judge. When Maldonado called and they spoke, the situation somehow felt even stranger. Apparently, he had ... won?

“It was unreal,” Moysaenko recalls. Seated behind his desk on our video call, he’s composed and professional in wire-framed glasses. He runs a hand through his short blond hair as he emphasizes how stunned he had felt in that moment. “I just didn’t know what to say. To be part of a lineage of really strong books, famous poets. Getting an award that I had dreamed of getting for many, many years. It felt like a great weight was taken off, that I didn't have to keep wondering if it was ever going to happen.”

The journey to a poet’s first book can take many forms, but Moysaenko’s path was longer than many.

As an undergrad, he noticed a common denominator, found deep in the résumés of contemporary younger poets whose work he gravitated toward—Dorothea Lasky, Heather Christle, Christopher DeWeese, Lisa Olstein, Michael Earl Craig. They had all studied in the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers program. Moysaenko, now 35, was also an avid reader of the program’s faculty, including James Tate, Dara Wier, and Peter Gizzi. “I was always a big fan,” he smiles. “The orbit just sort of pulled me in.” At UMass, he was buoyed by the multitude of fruitful poetic approaches taught by faculty members. “Taking classes with Jim Tate was definitely life-changing for me,” he says. “He really showed me different ways of walking through a poem, and then making one, that didn’t feel as regimented, and yet didn’t feel so mysterious at the same time. It gave me a new avenue I could use.”

Invasion

Moysaenko was immersed in the MFA program at UMass when Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine in 2014 after the massive protests known as the Maidan Revolution. As a Ukrainian American, he felt the rupture keenly, personally.

“All my family is Ukrainian,” he explains. “They came over in the 1950s, after World War II, as displaced persons or refugees. And I grew up in the Ukrainian immigrant community in the Greater Cleveland area. I went to a grade school founded by Ukrainian immigrants, speaking Ukrainian at home and at school.” Saturdays were spent studying the history, literature, art, and geography of the homeland. “It was a lot of immersion in the Ukrainian culture and that diasporic community,” he says, with a mixture of wistfulness and pride.

At UMass, though, Moysaenko wasn’t writing poems about the war consuming Ukraine. “I was still sort of processing,” he recounts. He was inundated with news reports and stories from relatives in Ukraine. At some point, he felt that writing anything else felt out of step with his intellectual and emotional life. On reflection, he says, “I was perhaps avoiding it, because it’s difficult.”

"To look at the world in a new way, and to not be complacent"

But then he started thinking about what art could offer in a situation like this. “It came to a breaking point where I couldn’t avoid writing about it anymore, and I’m the type of person who would be more miserable not writing,” he says. “So I thought, let’s just do this.”

‘Hyphenated American’

Moysaenko’s experience writing Overtakelessness became, in part, an investigation of his relationship to “the motherland” of Ukraine.

“A lot of so-called ‘hyphenated Americans’ have that kind of relationship where there’s an ancestral homeland you feel a strong connection to, and yet when you visit it or meet new immigrants, you realize—oh, there’s actually some distance that I’m experiencing here. I’m the American in this scenario.”

On the other hand, “When you're around other Americans who don't have that sort of ethnic upbringing, there’s a difference there, too. You grew up speaking a different language, you were eating food that most people don't eat. So, I think there's a strange isolation in that.”

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Finding form

Suspended between two cultures, Moysaenko turned to poetic frameworks that could explore this material and his relationship to it. He would need all the new avenues that had opened in his understanding of poetry, and then some. “In the end,” he says, “a lot of different forms came up, a sort of balance between more formalistic thinking and experimental thinking, which is, I think, the most honest way that I could have presented my experience.”

The central, serial poem of the collection uses collage as a way to frame and debunk many voices of Western news media for their “confusion of the facts and the issues at play in the war,” he explains. As a reader of the news, he felt a disconnect between his assessment of the situation and what pundits were positing. The technique of erasure, where words in an existing text are removed to create a new text out of those that remain, “gives you the gaps, the silences, the fragmentation that is mostly hidden in journalistic text,” he notes. Erasing and collaging news accounts along with first-person narratives allowed the poet to heighten the unsettledness and difficulty inherent in attempting to draw some singular truth from a multilayered, historically complex situation. Here was one answer, one way to approach the question of what poetry could provide when other media fell critically short.

Moysaenko wants the poems to address what he sees in America as “the notion that Ukraine is a recent country, when in fact, it is an older nation than Russia is.” Another foundational misunderstanding he observes is “that this latest conflagration is somehow an isolated incident in recent times.” In his experience, “If you study the history of the area, it's actually just the latest instance of a centuries-long imperialist attempt to subjugate countries around the Russian Empire.”

Other wars, other poems

The poem we’ve excerpted here, “Toys in a Field,” is written in conversation with a poem of the same title by Yusef Komunyakaa, an American poet who drew on his Vietnam War experience. Moysaenko explains, “I flipped his poem upside down so the first line of my poem is the last line of his.” From there, original lines by Moysaenko are interspersed with Komunyakaa’s lines, using the older poet’s observations of the war’s impacts on Vietnamese children to parallel what children are experiencing in Ukraine and in many other countries, Moysaenko says. This braided structure makes space for a kind of echo between conflicts, leading readers to reflect on the tenacious persistence of war. By engaging deeply with another poet’s work, Moysaenko reveals a universality that drives connection and emotion in the reader.

Staying tender

Overtakelessness was released this spring by Graywolf Press. The publisher describes it as a “powerful reckoning with war” and notes “the dissonance of experiencing it from afar.” What is it like to live our daily lives with such violence in the background, on our screens, in the news? What does that experience do to us, and what can we make of it?

As it happens, the book is being released into an America that is reckoning deeply with these questions. Poet and UMass professor Peter Gizzi remembers Moysaenko as “a brilliant presence” during his time at UMass and praises his “vigilance and commitment” in creating the book. Gizzi also notes that “overtakelessness” is a word coined by Emily Dickinson in a poem: “The overtakelessness of those/ Who have accomplished Death.” It seems fitting that an Amherst poet living through the Civil War provides the title for a collection describing contemporary overwhelm, a kind of impossibility of sense-making in the face of violence.

Moysaenko continues his work on more poems and a novel while also practicing law back in Ohio, slightly removed from the diasporic community of his youth, where he and his (non-Ukrainian) wife care for their young son. He exclusively speaks Ukrainian to his son, reads him Ukrainian-language books, and expects that while the boy’s exposure to Ukrainian culture will be less immersive than his own childhood, there will be plenty of familiarity with cultural events—music, dance, art, food, remembrances, and gatherings with extended family. As this first book makes its way into the world, he wants it to make meaningful connections with readers. “I do hope,” he says, “that it awakens in people a sort of intuition, or rings a bell that was quiet for a long time. You know when something is off, when something needs to be further examined. When it comes to issues like this, which are not peculiar, really, to Ukraine, this is really a timeless global problem.” On his journey to discover what art can offer in times of war, this poet wants us "to look at the world in a new way, and to not be complacent. To stay vigilant. And to stay tender.”

Listen to Daniel Moysaenko read “Toys in a Field”:

For more of Moysaenko’s work, visit his website.

“Toys in a Field” copyright © 2026 by Daniel Moysaenko. Reprinted from Overtakelessness with the permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved.