A Sword in Both Hands

Dick Westheimer's debut, A Sword in Both Hands: Poems Responding to Russia's war on Ukraine, is an achievement of profound empathy, reaching across the water to those suffering while reminding us of our distance from them as participatory spectators. The collection spans histories, languages, and forms, at once ambitious in scope and willing to pause with the particular, from the grocery sack of a refugee to the sunflower seed passing from the hands of an old woman to an invading soldier.

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