[dasein: defense of presence]

«The world has come together as a wedge in the defense of this land.

And even if there is something after that, even then——

we probably will never really need

another land»

A choice without a choice. Darkness and fury. Our consent to perish. Our choice to kill. Battle and emptiness. Daily losses. Losses that are no longer counted and felt. The borders of the earth, which you can recognize by touch.

Yaryna Chornohuz's poems are a kind of letters from the front, letters from the front line, where you will not find a description of hostilities or a list of liberated territories. These are letters about the pain of losing dead brothers and sisters, letters about being at war here and now, about realizing and accepting one's own choice to go to war, and letters about what the world will look like after all this pain that tears from the inside. Letters about what it looks like to defend your presence in this world.

Yaryna wrote these texts during the last year and a half of rotation at the front, a large part of which fell on a full-scale war. "In this selection," Yaryna writes, "my memory of Skadovsk and the sea coast of the Kherson region, Severodonetsk, and Mariupol, the heights above Novoaidar, the Bakhmut-Lysychansk road and the villages on the other side of Siversky Dinets, the river that became the Ukrainian Styx, will speak. And all of them feel to me like another small homeland, because they are measured by our steps along and across. Some are free and protected, most of them have yet to be freed."

Yaryna Chornohuz is a poet, combat medic, and intel (reconnaissance company, 140th separate reconnaissance battalion of the marines). The author of the poetry collection "How the military circle bends", written after four years in the Ukrainian army - rotations in "Hospitaliers" and service in the reconnaissance company of a marine infantry battalion.

"Poetry is my meditation. Not close to everyone, far from everyone understood, sometimes too personal, sometimes too distant and philosophical, but it definitely contains my truth about death, love, and the border at which knowledge occurs. Such a triangle of war" writes Yaryna.