Nothing to Write Home About

The collection draws on the genres of reportage, travelogue, family history, and a philosophical reflection on war’s ecstatic, frenzied humanity. Rather than focus on the familiar formula “war is hell,” it aims to capture a feeling of wonder at the resilience and persistence of war as a form of human activity; the sense of intensity and purpose it generates; and its compositional recurrence through history and family history.

Central to the collection is an examination of the process – often unconscious and involuntary – of an editing of memory that makes survival bearable despite its cognitive and spiritual costs. The poetic narrative weaves together seemingly disparate themes, exploring their interconnectedness: the logic of occupation, displacement, and extraction; the war over territories, natural and human resources, minerals and raw materials; the genocidal violence, mass population transfers, state-organized famine, terror, and other strategies of population control; the desire for immortality, which accounts for sexual reproduction in mortal animals, but also compels individuals to engage in philosophy, create art, and wage wars. I leave it ambiguous about which moments have focal priority, and which constitute interludes and digressions.

The poems in the collection use formal, visual, and sonic methods to toggle between different temporal, historical, and individual perspectives, stitching together narratives that bind generations of war survivors, and superimposing images from structurally similar moments to explore and problematize the concepts of home and family, epistemic reliability of testimony and oral history, the transmission of trauma and memory, and different types of intensity, extremity, and liminality. The poems probe what remains in the aftermath of translation of lived experience of suffering into art, and what form this remainder takes; as well as the afterlives not only of the original events, but of remembering them and of giving an artistic form to these acts of remembrance.