One of the most striking photographs shows a child in slippers, arms spread wide like wings, balancing on the wall of a ruined building. Throughout the black-and-white images Jonathan Boulet–Groulx captured for this book, a single contrast dominates: resignation against hope, squalor against tenderness, death against life. In these pages, Vanier returns to poetry to tell the story of a fractured world. On one side: the innocent suffering of those afflicted by disease, war, poverty, age, loneliness. On the other: the guilty anguish of those who remain "prisoners of selfish habit." Words and portraits of love alternate with passages of protest, where silent tears on children's faces or tears held back in adult eyes bear witness to the injustice that governs the world. "Hearts of stone"—deaf to cries of pain—are captured in their condition as isolated, sorrowful beings, phone pressed to ear, walking crowded streets as if crossing a desert alone. It is to these hearts that the book speaks, calling for a new way of seeing: one that recognizes fragility not as a curse, but as a bridge to the other.