Poetry. Paper, Perfect Bound. 78 pages
2025, ISBN: 978-1-952781-23-0 $20.95 + S&H $16.76 + S&H <<<<<SPECIAL PRE-PUBLICATION DISCOUNT PRICE
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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.
Praise for Lisken Van Pelt Dus’ work:
From the relentless music of her remixes to compassion for the cosmos, LVPD contemplates destruction and creation. A fire responds to interrogation with its own questions: “What did you burn as you grew?” She praises our universe in her ode to its “opalescent everything.” Nor does she eschew the human– arsonist to lady with the Blind Earl teacup. Magical in scope, this book expands the world of its own making. – Robin Scofield, Ridge of High Pressure
Ah, what a good book. The mode is wonderfully archaic, as in the creation stories or the challenge of Prometheus: “I need a god who can fit our globe / into the acorn I finger in my pocket.” The mode is wonderfully contemporary, as we are challenged to find the violent roots of the exponentially-growing and library-burning fire of our times without and within ourselves. The mode is wonderfully transhistorical, piercing space-time to walk through the wars of our time and to surface in the future of an Earth after the great dying-off for which we are to blame. The mode is wonderfully lyrical, acknowledging that “violence is inevitable” but love is, too, and inviting us: “Coat yourself in phosphorescence. / Remember, you wanted to be the ocean, / to gleam like that.” Read this book — and gleam. – Tony Barnstone, author of The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity and Apocryphal Poems
Bold and unafraid in their address and their brave ventriloquism, the poems in Lisken Van Pelt Dus’ How Many Hands to Home conduct a deep and broad inquiry into the ways we must live with the consequences of our errant philosophies, with the climate crisis, with war, with atrocious violence and the looming collapse of humane values. Even as she acknowledges, in poem after poem, the many challenges of the anthropocene, the poet remembers to praise and insists on abiding love, “Because, why not? oh most/ opalescent everything….” – Richard Hoffman author of People Once Real
Between Damage and Lighthouse
It isn’t easy, she says, this living,
how it hurts
constantly, the beauty
and the unthinkable,
the faith in my child’s face
and the fact of children drowning,
the fox sliding across the lawn
and the night ahead of her
alive and killing. On every scale,
she says, it isn’t easy—
my ash trees dying, eaten
from the inside out, my heart
struggling against containment, against
its countdown hammering
my ribs. We want
and don’t want. I know
a boy, she says, who gouged hate
into his arm after his mother
hanged herself for him to find her.
Grown now, he’s inked it over.
Still life isn’t easy for him,
like when his dog who was the center
of his ground got cancer—
what was he to do with that—
but he insists on loving, all while
his heart and the world batter him.
So much hangs in the balance
between damage and lighthouse,
between words carved into your own skin
and words transparent.
Do you understand, she says.
This living’s precarious.
(First published in The Comstock Review, Special Merit Award, Muriel Craft Bailey Contest, 2022)
About the Author
Lisken Van Pelt Dus is the author of another collection of poems, What We’re Made Of, as well as two chapbooks, Everywhere at Once and Letters to My Dead. She was raised in England, the US, and Mexico, and now lives with her husband in western Massachusetts, where she is an award-winning teacher of writing, languages, and martial arts. Her work can be found in many journals, anthologies, and craft books, and has earned several awards and Pushcart Prize nominations.