Special Operation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781957372228)

In Special Operation, Mark Pawlak bears witness to war with moral urgency and precision. Soldiers retrieve frost-covered bodies stacked in trenches "and we must remember to remain human." Blood pools on a sidewalk; cups of tea remain warm beside the dead. Each image strikes like a match in darkness, briefly illuminating how people endure, resist and continue to see. In a Brechtian spirit, these poems insist on truth stripped of consolation, asking readers not to look away but to reckon. Pawlak's compressed, lyrical lines cut through silence to reveal the costs of war--and the fragile, stubborn humanity still under fire. --Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and Bad Harvest.