Documentary and Witness poetry capture the turbulence of contemporary life, its urgent issues where we all often helplessly confront individual crises and global disasters. In this collection of fifteen elegies, a little boy rides his bicycle through the wreckage of his hometown, Mosul; an animal rights activist attempts to rescue a truckload of pigs heading to slaughter; St John ignores the refugees drowning in the Mediterranean and continues to write a chapter of the Judeo-Christian Bible in his cave nearby; in Toronto a homeless beggar woman unexpectedly shows the narrator a glorious Asian pear; and a Japanese fisherman travels to northern B.C. in a redemptive moment encounters his childhood boat and an elusive spirit bear.