by Sherod Santos

In this ground-breaking new collection, award-winning poet Sherod Santos takes on a subject not often scaled to the measure of the lyric poem. In a radical departure from his early work, he has composed a book from scraps, fragments, disconnected images drawn from the ruins of warring conflicts dating back in time to the ancient Greeks and forward to the modern world. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic picture of history’s unending cycle of catastrophe, what has now become a commonplace in our world. There is nothing journalistic, or documentary, or polemical about The Burning World, nor is history reducible to Santos’s own personal and political views. The impression the book leaves us with is that the compulsion for war lies within us, at the very core of human nature.

“Not since W.S. Merwin’s The Lice has an American poet written as prophetically as Santos has in The Burning World. His eloquent witness to the quickening evanescence of the Earth, along with so-called civilization, haunts his reader with the paradoxical vision of the proverbial blind prophet who “sees.” Santos has commented in an interview that he “thinks of his books as “bracketed obsessions — bracketed by time or circumstance — and that writing each book [has been] an attempt to interrogate, elaborate, and examine each obsession.” His “obsession” in The Burning World betrays a formidable ambition to “testify” beyond his personal griefs to grief for the world itself, along with his concomitant observations of just what’s burning. After announcing ironically at the outset that there’s “nothing much left to talk about,” Santos has indeed succeeded in “talking” in a most timely and vatic way about the world afire to capture a visible specter of the eschaton.“
-Chard deNiord, On the Seawall