This is the best book of erasure poems since Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager. The book is an intense meditation on war, riddled with aporia and drawing on many resources—documentary, epistolary, and even rhyming lyric—to create an empathic and deeply affecting experience of contact with the devastation war brings and “with the pain about to come.”

Collier Nogues is nothing short of brilliant in this necessary book—a hybrid of poetry and visual art—which lights up a long shadow two big governments have cast on a miraculous island and an indigenous people. The speakers of these poems are visionary; they are “one of us.”  And if we can see that, we can see what Nogues has envisioned here, see how our world can change in the direction of mercy, human dignity, survival.

Taken together, these poems not only express a desire to erase violence, but they also attempt to map the topography of islands and nations, caves and embrasures, weapons and flags, grace and dread. Collier Nogues is a brave poet who disassembles the official discourses of empire to articulate a dream for an island of peace.