This book provides a significant contribution to current thinking about poetic inquiry. Drawing from her experience as a researcher, poet, and educator, the author engages in depth with the field of poetic inquiry to address the relationships among witness, research, and art. It originates from the Apol's experience facilitating a collaborative project that involved educators and mental health professionals from the U.S. and Rwanda, developing a therapeutic writing workshop model to facilitate healing among survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

While in Rwanda, Apol used her own poetry writing to better understand and come to terms with her personal responses to what she was learning; eventually, she came to view this as poetic inquiry. In this book, she uses her own poems to demonstrate the strengths and complexities of poetic inquiry: the importance of craft (the aesthetic); the imperative of accuracy and reliability (the investigative); the significance of ethical responsibility that leads to action (witness); and the centrality of relational connectedness and accountability (withness). Apol raises questions about what it means for poems to function as both research and art, and illustrates what happens when the demands of the poem and a commitment to relationships conflict. She concludes that the lessons that accompany her use of poetry in Rwanda as poetic inquiry go beyond arts-based research and speak as well to other forms of cross-national, cross-cultural scholarship.