"Fusing the mythical with the political and the global with the personal, the poems in Orlowsky’s Those Absences Now Closest offers a reflective authority about generational trauma and family stories and their necessity for the diaspora  during times of war and hardship. These poems bear witness to the tragedies unfolding in war-torn Ukraine, and they bring the nightmarish demons of war—both figurative and literal—to the forefront for all to see."