“I want to make the world safe for you,” Shaindel Beers says in one of her poems in her collection The Children’s War and Other Poems (Salt Publishing). Although she’s addressing her unborn child in this poem, this compassionate, engaging, and strong voice carries through all of her work.The disaster that war causes is far-reaching and enormous in scale; rather than give us aerial views of this trauma, Beers’s poems zoom way in, and tell the individual and fragmented stories of how children process loss, pain, and helplessness.
I love what these poems do, and find them tremendously protective and empathetic.
(NOTE: After the interview below, read “Little Amira Honors Her Cat, Pepa,” and “Love Poem for the Other Woman” both of which appear with permission of the author. Also, be sure to check out the video beneath the poems, featuring The Portland Cello Project’s performance of original music composed to the “Little Amira” poem. Order a signed copy of the book here.)
Q: While reading The Children’s War and Other Poems, I noticed how intensely personal each of these poems feel. The bulk of these poems borrow from the lives of others (as many poems do), and I admired how you maintained such an intimate, authentic voice throughout the collection. When you write, how do you relate to the personal? How does your own experience get translated or transformed by writing?
A: I think a lot of writing and a lot of empathy, actually, is about acting. About putting yourself into the character of the other person. How would I feel if I were a woman with a missing child, or how would I feel if I were the child who has lost not just her family but her beloved pet in a grenade attack, or in another poem in the collection, how would it feel to be Marilyn Monroe?
