How Many Hands to Home by Lisken Van Pelt Dus

 

ISBN: 978-1-952781-23-0

Publication date: 2025 

How Many Hands to Home by Lisken Van Pelt Dus unfolds as a luminous meditation on memory, displacement, and belonging a poetic constellation that bridges the intimate and the infinite. Through themes of migration, ancestry, and renewal, Dus leads readers through a lyrical journey pulsing with both the ache of distance and the quiet wonder of return.

In The Arsonist Addresses the Gods, Dus reflects on creation and destruction, comparing divine memory to human fragility. Fire becomes both confessor and storyteller, “fingers of light flickering,” transforming devastation into illumination. The poem distils the essence of the collection: a world perpetually burning, yet endlessly regenerating. The imagery, textured with myth and mortality, feels at once epic and deeply personal.

Towards the Starting Points examines language and lineage, engaging the inherited weight of colonial histories. In How to Become a Raft, the poet captures the restless crossing between water and sky, body and spirit. The line “Lash yourself to the air with their loose tentacles” fuses physical endurance with existential longing.

Lash yourself to the air with their loose tentacles.

They’ve been detached a long time

and no longer sting.

Remember when you were nine—

a moon-white beach,

dark water glittering.

Coat yourself in phosphorescence.

Remember, you wanted to be the ocean,

to gleam like that.

Lisken’s command of structure balancing narrative clarity with formal experimentation creates a dynamic reading experience. Her Remix poems integrate historical voices and documentary fragments, blurring the line between poetry and testimony. These formal risks, rooted in empathy, align her work with the evolving terrain of contemporary humanist poetry.

In the final sequence, Ode to the Universe, the collection resolves into a quiet transcendence. Dus envisions love, memory, and loss as coordinates on the same vast map, offering a hard-won acceptance that feels both timeless and timely. Her voice, calm yet resonant, captures what it means to live between constellations of origin and exile.

How Many Hands to Home is more than a poetry collection; it’s a cartography of consciousness, evoking the luminous ache of belonging, survival, and remembrance. With elemental power and emotional precision, Lisken transforms fragments of history into constellations of hope and human endurance.

 

~ Rochak Agarwal