The Children’s War (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

In the title sequence of The Children’s War and Other Poems, an atelier of ekphrastic lyrics based on artworks by children from Chechnya, Darfur, and other recent war zones, Shaindel Beers tells us “There are things that can happen that you can’t draw.” Yet with gem-hard language and heartrending imagery, she confronts us with the unspeakable reality of “children being scattered / like a broken strand of brightly colored beads.” Beers joins the ranks of Edgar Lee Masters and Ted Kooser with her portraits of ordinary Americans, many of them women, devastated by physical and emotional hardship, but she enters risky and breathtaking territory all her own with her intimate portraits of domestic abuse and of her fears, as a new mother, that “violence is the one tool / I have been given.” Yet for all their darkness, the poems find hope: in memory, in everyday beauty, in the bonds of love. “This isn’t much, but it’s the gift,” Beers assures students at a reservation, “the one gift, these stories, that can’t be taken away.” Shaindel Beers’ poems place a moral burden upon us, one that can’t be taken away, but they offer the strength to bear it up.

In the first half of The Children’s War, Shaindel Beers looks at artwork done by and about child survivors of war, embodying the voices of the children, their families, and the humanitarian aid workers sent to help them. From there, the book opens out into an exploration of the war at home and the war within ourselves, exploring violence in mythology, domestic violence, and the wars that occur, sometimes, within our own bodies.

These poems act as a survival guide, showing that hope exists even in the darkest of places and that perhaps poetry is the key to our healing.