Review:
The poems in HERE, BULLET are steeped in pity for the occupants of Iraq, while at the same time remaining on full alert to the likely moment "when a twelve-year-old / rolls a grenade into the room"...The most effective instrument in Turner's kit is his detachment... the particulars are so shocking that they need no sentimental boost... which is deployed in combination with complex feeling... There are poems in HERE, BULLET good enough to hold a place in any anthology of war poetry.' (In the line of fire: James Campbell asks where are the war poets of today) --James Campbell, The Guardian
Turner attempts to capture the extreme experience of war by depicting the feelings it generates: the sense of loss, hatred, humiliation, love, uncertainty, and dreamy longing for a normal life. --Library Journal
Several hundred books have now been published on the Iraq War...but none has felt necessary until now. There's something in the lumbering of prose that cannot capture what poetry, done right, can make immanent with its insistent beat...With Brian Turner's Here, Bullet, we have the first war poetry since Yusef Komunyakaa's DIEN CAI DAU that matters. --Rain Taxi
About the Author:
Brian Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq from November 2003 with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999-2000 he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division. Born in 1967, he received an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before joining the army. His poetry was included in the VOICES IN WARTIME ANTHOLOGY published in conjunction with a feature-length documentary film. HERE, BULLET (Bloodaxe, 2007) was first published by Alice James Books in the US in 2005, where it has earned Turner nine major literary awards, including a 2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry.
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