Peace Maps

Peace Maps explores real and imaginary terrain at the intersection of ecology and devastation. From Chaco Canyon to Chernobyl, Beirut to Zuma, the poet excavates artifacts and elements to map themes of love, loss, motherhood, and healing. Sensory natural images take root and grow beneath daily lives—offering hope, heart, and glimmers of peace.

The poet Karen Lewis engages with the environment in ways that probe the current moment where reality touches imagination. Poems connect her personal journeys through love, loss, motherhood, and solitude with a complicated terrain of war, peace, and places in-between. In this era of increasing globalization, these poems argue for particular connections to particular places. “Desolation Wilderness” brings readers to a mountain region accessed only by foot. “Sian Ka’an Biosphere” (a ghazal) excavates tons of ocean plastics washing ashore. “Painted Cave” traces a new mother's connections with the unceded indigenous land where she lives, her own ancestors, her husband’s war trauma, and her newborn infant. “Sappho’s Island” celebrates silences, spaces and the concept of erasure. “Prayer Beads” is a praise-song for Baghdad, a city that is the cradle of civilization and a contemporary war zone. Because poetry cannot always fit into lines, “Peace Summit” creates a visual ascent to a place of balance and duality. “Tunis” celebrates the pulse of women demonstrating during the Jasmine Revolution, while “Place of Echoes” deciphers what remains of a ruined Mayan temple.

As a collection of poetic cartography—and a reflection of how one woman navigates a privileged life through an often-murky lens—Peace Maps faces the future without easy answers. The poems here invite readers to risk their own imaginative journeys through whatever challenging times they may face, wherever in the world they may be.