In Cynthia Hogue’s tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark, she explores the lingering ghosts of war after her husband suffers a heart attack and recounts dreams of his childhood during World War II. Hogue begins to document her husband’s memories and nightmares about growing up in postwar France during food shortages. The project takes on another meaning when Hogue embarks on a journey to collect stories from her husband’s extended family still living in France. Through research, interviews, and conversations, Hogue creates a powerfully moving collection that interrogates how war can affect one family and how history overlaps, often messily and painfully, with the present. On the collection, the poet Ilya Kaminsky writes, “How do other people’s memories come to live in our bodies, how do they travel by means of language, from one human body to another, across time and miles, painful miles? I ask this question out of sorrow, yes, but also in wonder, upon reading Cynthia Hogue’s beautiful, transformative instead, it is dark, a book not of tales or dreams or historical accounts but of memories that survive us, that have already survived us, as they’ve entered the lyric.” It was an honor to review Hogue’s book and also speak with her about documentary poetics, poetic witness, poetry and “responsibility,” and much more.