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Reading through Szymborska’s poetry is like parsing through the mind of a quiet but deeply observant life, the mind of someone perched high enough to see people as they are, yet buried low enough in the ground to uncover the darkest understanding of death and humanity’s inhumanity. Her many-paged Map is now and will forever be a reference for shared solace in every honest respect, pages and poems to be revisited again and again as the clouds change above and below every generation that hopes for something better, something better from our shared existence than the horrors we keep repeating. Wislawa Szymborska was a Polish teenager when Hitler invaded her country, though she rarely speaks of that time or those years with any kind of prose or narrative; only through lines and verses that briefly uncover her response to atrocities repeated, far beyond the age of Hitler or her own experience as a child.