Valence: Considering War Through Poetry and Theory

In this remarkable annotated poem, Susan Hawthorne commits to words the horrors of war and dares to draw links between militarism, fundamentalism, and the sex industry. Shattering the conspiracy of silence, she rails against the violence of war and contemplates the link between place and the history of war that is infused into the earth. It is a work that looks at how war is generated and what keeps it going, asking important questions about what’s in it for those who go to war. This fresh examination that is both essay and poem combines the personal and the political, the historical and the contemporary to consider the endless cycle of war that survives on the persistence of hope—hope of an end to war and suffering.