Petals: Poems of a War in Ukraine

This is the story of a war.

But it is also a story of human love and beauty and faith that the sun will rise again over a nation torn by terrible conflict.If a novel is like live streaming video, then poetry is a gallery of HD images taken with your iPhone or Nikon DSLR, each picture sharp and crystalline and rich with color and meaning, etched in your mind forever thanks to its precision and brilliance.

This is a small book of such high definition images, vivid snaps of one man's journey through the recent military conflict in Ukraine. People's faces are here, fields of flowers are here, impossibly blue skies and sharp suns, roads and streets and windows that remain perfectly intact even though the rest of the house has been blown to pieces. Love is here, and peace sits in the same room as pain, while hope has more strength than killing or death. The man's words are beautiful and true and, as real as the war he fights is, dawn and tomorrow are more real.

Parts of it will tell your story. Parts of it will become your story. Parts of it will take you on a journey you never expected to take. That is the power of poetry in motion.

Begin at this man's beginning.