Synopses & Reviews
In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner crossed the line of departure with a convoy of soldiers headed into the Iraqi desert. Now, each night beside his sleeping wife, he imagines himself as a drone aircraft, hovering over the terrains of Bosnia and Vietnam, Iraq and Northern Ireland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the death camps of Europe--a landscape of ongoing violence, revealing all that man has done to man.
Review
"Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a meditation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book." Larry Heinemann, author of Paco's Story, winner of the National Book Award
Review
"Turner's voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity...as precise as a bullet, as all-encompassing as the apocalypse. One question echoes through these pages: How does someone leave a war behind and walk into the rest of their life? holds a mirror up to what propels us, over and over, into those wars, and serves as a reminder that, in the end, war is simply about counting the dead. Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful." Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and The Ticking Is the Bomb
Review
"A brilliant fever dream of war's surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art." Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust
Review
" is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered--a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature." George Packer The New Yorker
Review
"In Brian Turner's extraordinarily capable hands, language is war's undoing, in the sense that his words won't allow absurdity and terror to be anything less than real.
Review
"Moments of candor and existential longing break open to expose a world of truths... Brian Turner is a born storyteller." Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Neon Vernacular, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize
Review
"[A] praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function beautifully in nonfiction writing.... Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present.... History can only be served by this kind of attention. Man must look at what he has done. And Turner looks, brilliantly." Jen Percy
Review
"Turner is...a poet, and he cannot help but see the world, even the world of combat, in terms of beauty, fragility and heartbreaking splendor.... [His] eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqis--their language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives." Roxana Robinson Washington Post
Synopsis
A war memoir of unusual literary beauty and power from the acclaimed poet who wrote the poem "The Hurt Locker."
About the Author
Brian Turner is the director of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and the prize-winning author of two poetry collections about his seven years in the United States Army. He lives in Orlando, Florida.