On a contested road, a column of elephants crosses, and for a moment even the rifles hesitate. It is the kind of moment David Brickey Bloomer has spent more than twenty years learning to see. Waiting on the Elephants gathers sixteen poems and a sequence of black-and-white photographs drawn from a working life across South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and beyond: a checkpoint at dusk, a bookseller's stall in Yangon, a boat on a frozen lake in Kashmir, a bread shop in Kabul, the wreckage a typhoon leaves behind, a camp still standing years after it was meant to close.

David Brickey Bloomer writes as a witness, not a saviour. These are poems of displacement, grief, and endurance, spare and unsentimental, close to what people actually do rather than what they're meant to represent: flour rising like dust made holy, children flowering through drowning fields, a mother gone to snow. The photographs do not illustrate the poems so much as stand beside them, trusting the image to carry what words can only approach.

Spare, exact, and unsentimental, Waiting on the Elephants is a book about what is asked of people, and what they do with it — without the promise that any of it adds up to more than the doing itself.