n this time of acrimony and push-button polemics, it is a rare pleasure to discover a writer whose politically engaged poetry is vividly alive to the nuances evoked by incisive imagery and evocative form, a writer whose work explores both the rhetoric of argument and the intimacies of psychic and emotional revelation—the domain of true poetry—to bring us news from the real world, “where the mountains are burning and we cannot sleep.” Pamela Uschuk’s Refugee is just such a book, brimming with poems that powerfully communicate the ache—and the grace—of true witness, poems that linger in the heart as well as the mind.