The Burning World

In this ground-breaking new collection, award-winning poet Sherod Santos takes on a subject not often scaled to the measure of the lyric poem. In a radical departure from his early work, he has composed a book from scraps, fragments, disconnected images drawn from the ruins of warring conflicts dating back in time to the ancient Greeks and forward to the modern world. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic picture of history's unending cycle of catastrophe, what has now become a commonplace...
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In this ground-breaking new collection, award-winning poet Sherod Santos takes on a subject not often scaled to the measure of the lyric poem. In a radical departure from his early work, he has composed a book from scraps, fragments, disconnected images drawn from the ruins of warring conflicts dating back in time to the ancient Greeks and forward to the modern world. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic picture of history's unending cycle of catastrophe, what has now become a commonplace in our world: "Another flag, another ruin, another marble god. / Another man's version of the Promised Land."There is nothing journalistic, or documentary, or polemical about The Burning World, nor is history reducible to Santos's own personal and political views. The impression the book leaves us with is that the compulsion for war lies within us, at the very core of human nature.Enigmatic and haunting, The Burning World is grounded in uneasy truths, but the future is not foreclosed, "For who are we to live beyond [compassion], / if not to carry on, if not in Heaven here, / on this our more or less common ground?"