The Weight of What Remains

This is a book with an unmistakable, unashamed purpose: to say what needs saying about a life lived across continents, uniforms, and losses, before it's too late to say it. Peskens isn't chasing literary fashion — he's chasing witness. And in that mode, the collection lands hardest not in its most polished lines but in its rawest ones. "Thousand-Yard Stare" earns its recurring refrain ("I left the field, but it won't let go") through sheer accumulated repetition, the way trauma itself repeats. "Blood, Dust, and Silence" does something genuinely valuable for the genre of border-war testimony: it names the specific cruelties (varkpan, the white wall, soutpiel) with footnotes that turn the poem into both elegy and document. That's a craft choice that works on its own terms — a reader unfamiliar with the SADF conscription system gets both the gut-punch and the context.

The dedication and the birthday poem for Inge ("Whispers through the Trees") are the emotional keel of the whole book — unguarded, plainspoken grief that doesn't reach for metaphor it hasn't earned. "You're part of the stories we tell every day, / And part of the songs that will never fade away" recurs from the dedication into the poem itself, which is a lovely structural echo whether or not it was intentional.

The weakness is evenness of craft — many poems lean on ABAB rhyme and stock imagery (dust, ghosts, echoes) that blur together across sixty poems. But the reader this book is for — someone who served, who grieved, who left one home for another — will find their exact ache named here, chapter by chapter, in an order the preface insists is "not accidental." That intentionality of arc is real, and it's rare.