Maggie Helwig is perhaps best known for her highly visual poetry, clear-eyed lyrics that celebrate the world’s beauty even as they lament its suffering. Where She Was Standing, Helwig’s first novel, has all the best qualities of that poetry.

Set in the early 1990s, Where She Was Standing explores the aftermath of a massacre of protestors by the Indonesian military in occupied East Timor. The military tries to conceal the massacre by arresting and ‘disappearing’ witnesses, but a network of human rights workers, Timorese resistance fighters, and activists works secretly to get the news out. One of those missing is a Canadian art student whose camera may contain footage of the shootings, and the perilous struggle to get that footage out of East Timor provides much of the story’s tension.

On this level Where She Was Standing works as an excellent suspense novel: the characters are engaging, the plot is tight, the stakes are high. But the book is also the elaboration of a truth that runs through Helwig’s poetry: “To say, what are you suffering,/is the one true act of greatness we can own.” The novel is about people whose calling is to bear witness to the suffering of those who have disappeared. Sometimes all that remains is a name; sometimes there is some evidence that says, “This is where she was standing.” But without witnesses who have the greatness to speak, even at risk to themselves, those traces are lost and humanity is diminished.

Where She Was Standing is beautifully written – Helwig knows the precise details that render a scene true. The novel form also gives Helwig room to engage with the complex social and political issues that have always driven her essays and short stories. The result is a compelling, insightful, and deeply humane book that is both politically and artistically mature.