GODS of UNFINISHED BUSINESS - Paperback

by Nina Kossman (Author), Nina Kossman (Cover Design by), Ilya Kaminsky (Foreword by)

What is Nina Kossman's God, and what kind of Unfinished Business are we about to get into, I wondered, opening this

book of poems. "History Transformed into Myth," the subtitle at the front of these pages warned, and I wondered

what is history if not already a myth. That's what I thought, getting started, yes-right before I

learned that Kossman sent me these poems from a warzone, literally: the poet's e-mail said she was in the occupied Ukraine

at that time. And just like that, the mythological history, whatever that is, became a documentary fact.

Facts take an interesting role in this collection of poems, actually: we begin with an echo of an ancient Akkadian text

also taking place in a warzone, though of a very different kind. And, indeed, the myth comes forth. Or, rather, the myth is

denied us ("What Ismul's soul learned in the city of souls is never revealed") only to be revealed as the pages turn: