“There is no good way to die. / But there are worse / ways to live,” writes W. Luther Jett in “LATE FEBRUARY 2022,” a poem about the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Longtime readers of Jett’s poetry won’t be surprised that in The Colour War, Jett gazes clear-eyed at destruction: choppers, shells, Molotov cocktails. Dead bodies in the streets of Bucha and Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Ecocide. The persecution of women in Iran and Afghanistan. And yet he finds great beauty among the ruins: the crust of snow on a mountain, fields of bright flowers. Even wounds can be unspeakably beautiful. Like Anne Frank, whose words serve as the epigraph for this finely tuned collection, Jett somehow manages to retain his optimism, and he states his credo clearly: “Whoever you / are — I can’t shake this / or fake this — Whoever / you are — I love you.”

—Katherine E. Young, author of Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards, Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, VA

About W. Luther Jett