Paper Bridge

Paper Bridge is the first bilingual collection by Ukrainian poet Vasyl Makhno, a "e;master of the contemporary Ukrainian Ballad, who builds a lifeline for the broken-hearted wanderers, homeless heartbreakers, hopeless romantics, and helpful ironists,"e; in the words of Valzhyna Mort, winner of the Griffin Poetry prize. Makhno's bridge extends to us all, serving whatever purpose we need it to, as Lidijia Dimkovska, author of A Spare Life, writes, "e;it is a bridge that can burn or resist... but it is a witness to the existence of a traveler through souls, bodies, and spirits, through our own subconsciousness."e; With this outstanding collection of poems, Makhno is able to preserve an "e;enviable spiritual equilibrium...one that grinds out the music even in the toughest of days, a music that survived the twentieth century and keeps alive in the new horrors of the twenty-first,"e; in the words of Los Angeles Book Prize winner Ilya Kaminsky, "e;and now despite it all, even in his room in New York City away from Ukraine, [Makhno] can still hear how 'old age sings' how it 'nervously forces the music into a rhythm,"e; and how 'it might falter, but it plays again.'"e;