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Brian Turner
In previous posts I have discussed three poets — Walter E. Piatt, Paul Wasserman, and Elyse Fenton — who explore how the contemporary wars have wrought alterations of perspective and emotion on those...
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Brian Turner, Benjamin Busch, Siobhan Fallon, and Exit12 @ West Point
This event brought together three great authors–Brian Turner, Siobhan Fallon, and Benjamin Busch–to speak about their efforts to portray the turmoil of war. As each of them had been profoundly...
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Little Magazines 2: Ep;phany
The winter/spring 2013 edition of Ep;phany: A Literary Journal is guest edited by poet Brian Turner. Not fooling around, Turner has solicited and selected quality work from a who’s who of contemporary...
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Veterans Writing
Matt Gallagher’s latest post on the New York Times At War webpage explains the structural fault lines that divide the veterans writing community. Gallagher notes that veterans writing workshops are a...
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Veterans Day Poem–Brian Turner’s “Wading Out”
I’ve carried this poem around in my mind since the first time I read it. It’s from Brian Turner’s 2010 collection Phantom Noise. Wading Out We’re crossing an open field, sweating in December’s heat,...
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The Classical Roots of Contemporary War Literature: Been There, Done That,...
Beyond the walls of this Afghanistan FOB, a hilltop fortress reportedly built by Alexander the Great Many contemporary war authors, artists, and thinkers have turned to classical Greece for subjects,...
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Little Magazines 3: Prairie Schooner and Michigan Quarterly Review
Two respected academic journals feature big time talents as guest editors of recent issues given over to war literature. Prairie Schooner invited Brian Turner to assemble an all-star collection of...
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War Poetry: Brian Turner’s “A Soldier’s Arabic”
Brian Turner’s “A Soldier’s Arabic,” adapted by Giulia Alvarez. Click to enlarge! “A Soldier’s Arabic” This is a strange new kind of war where you learn just as much as you are able to believe....
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Requiem for Sergeant T: Brian Turner’s My Life as a Foreign Country
“I am a drone aircraft plying the darkness above my body, flying over my wife as she sleeps beside me, over the curvature of the earth, over the glens of Antrim and the Dalmation coastline, the shells...
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October in the Railroad War Lit Earth
Fort Riley, Kansas, October 2008 “October in the Railroad Earth” is the title of a beautiful prose-poem by Jack Kerouac, who served for about a week in the Navy during World War II and somewhat longer...
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Dodge (War) Poetry Festival 2014
Elyse Fenton, Dodge Poetry Festival 2014. War subjects and themes were the focus of this year’s Dodge Poetry Festival, the nation’s largest celebration of poetry, held annually in Newark, New Jersey....
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War Writing: The Raw and the Cooked
Khost Province, Afghanistan (USAF photograph). A flutter of recent data points raise the questions whether veterans are natural storytellers and whether they are prone to adorn their stories to impress...
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22 American Iraq and Afghanistan War Poets
Soldiers Patrolling Wheatfield, Khost Province, Afghanistan (USAF-ISAF photo) To honor National Poetry Month, below are poems by twenty-two American writers whose poems reflect and engage America’s...
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On to Tampa! AWP18
Now I got a reason, now I got a reason, now I got a reason, now I got a reason…. –“Holidays in the Sun,” the Sex Pistols Thursday through Saturday this week in Tampa, Florida, is the Association of...
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AWP18-Tampa, FL
The annual AWP writers’ conference is a feel-good affair more suited for socializing and networking than serious literary pondering. So it was this year, too, in Tampa in March, even as the writing,...
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Body of Work
Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. -Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, while writing Moby-Dick. Since I began Time Now...
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Firstest With the Mostest: Turner, Bigelow, Fallon
Brian Turner’s poetry volume Here, Bullet, director Kathryn Bigelow’s movie The Hurt Locker, and Siobhan Fallon’s short-story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone stand at the beginning of the...
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