I think I needed to experience this collection of poetry today. One of my new year's resolutions is to read and listen to more poetry, so this was a chance to press into that goal. But also, I needed this collection to serve as a kind of map to how poets made sense or nonsense or anything of war because I'm sitting in the tension of this current moment in the United States and the world and rendered speechless. It's all too much and not enough simultaneously. And this collection of poetry is helping me navigate my way out of the wrong kind of silence. I only wish that poems were more clearly contextualized in the periods in history from which they emerge. But then again, perhaps not anchoring them in context appealed to the more universal experience of war and remembrance across time and cultures.