Paper Chains by Loretta Oleck

While volunteering at the Ritsona Refugee Camp in Greece, Oleck witnessed not only the obvious and immediate result of Syrian citizens fleeing for their lives, but the hidden cost: psychological damage to both sexes, and across all ages. Her resulting poems span modern Western references, timeless hardship, and universal human empathy in the face of hopelessness. At their best, they remind us—despite how hard we hope against it—we are all subject to unwanted change, natural and manmade disaster, and diaspora.

The Czesław Miłosz poem “Dedication” asks us “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?” At this time, Oleck’s poems in this new collection have not saved nations or people, but she has documented the recent Syrian plight movingly, and that is the foothold art creates on the journey of understanding we are all human; bound only by our minds and the borders we have created there. Read this book and step across the line with her.
–Ron Egatz, award-winning poet, author of Beneath Stars Long Extinct 

In Paper Chains, Loretta Oleck’s becomes an astute eye-witness to the tragic plight of the refugee crisis, where children are caught between worlds. Hands-on, the poet reveals the discordant lining of their lives, “school desks were chipped/into kindling” and where “A full moon is shaped like a barrel bomb.” Oleck engages us with an intimate look into the tents, hearts and minds of a transient culture where, “mothers fold sorrows into laundry.” In these nuanced and lyrical portraits, the poet reveals the resilient nature of children to find beauty in chaos. There is pain and bewilderment, “some make chains /just so they can break them.” But the poet renders and shines a talisman of light and dignity to these individuals found in distress, illuminating the tender mercies of human life in this most impactful and stunning collection.

–Cynthia Atkins, author of In The Event of Full Disclosure

Across a tent-scarred landscape, the dispossessed mark time. Children play in the dust. Men and boys disguise their defeat, swallow their rage, while women struggle against the almost certain knowledge that no matter what they do, one day “everything will come crashing down.” By volunteering her help and writing about the experience, Loretta Oleck has accomplished far more than she knows. Her poems illuminate the Syrian diaspora, make it personal, and humanize its victims. These remarkable poems will change you, and haunt you.

–Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of The Dead Kid Poems, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly.

In Paper Chains, Loretta Oleck becomes a sensitive firsthand witness to the harrowing realities of Syrian war refugees, for whom hope is “barely audible”—like “a lone moth’s wings / tapping and scratching on tent walls.” There are few subjects today that are more troubling, or more urgent. Together, these passionate poems form a composite sketch of a place where “Mothers fold sorrows like laundry” and “children create beauty / out of nothing.” –
–Jonathan Blunk author of James Wright: A Life in Poetry (FSG 2017), praised by The New York Times as “fine-grained literary biography at its finest.”