Van Pelt Dus

How Many Hands to Home is a journey of compassion, traveling through fire, war and displacement to arrive at a place of acceptance and embrace of the expansive human spirit. The many voices of the poems engage with both individual and shared experience, exploring the two sides-the challenges and the sweetness-of forging home in our communities and on our planet. Though the poems engage head-on with the various ways in which humanity fails its promise, their movement is towards love-not blind or saccharine, but knowing and inclusive.

Formally diverse but always musical, the poems in this collection interrogate our lives at their worst and their best, as we move through the universe that created and contains us. They confront both the beautiful and the destructive, probing for answers to the puzzle of our competing impulses. In deft and luscious language, this collection speaks to all of us as we try to make sense of violence and separation, and offers the power of awe as a means of survival.

In the pages of this book, you’ll witness heartbreak and loss but also resilience and love. You’ll meet gods and soldiers, strangers and family members, the privileged and the disenfranchised. You’ll walk through London, visit battlefields in Europe, stare down guns in the United States, and explore beyond our galaxy. And through these travels, you’ll find a kind of hope that gives rise to a faith that believes in it all.