Death's Homeland

"To convey the struggle to remain human in the midst of atrocious violence requires a stoic honesty about the powerful pull of hatred and despair; in these poems we feel that pull, but we also come to inhabit the poet's refusal to capitulate, his adamantly lyrical commitment to the individual human soul. These poems are as welcome and heart-breaking as birdsong between bombardments. A reader can only be grateful." —Richard Hoffman, author of Gold Star Road

"These indelible lyric poems of extremity bear the spiritual and cognitive shattering of loss—the loss that is war, that is death, the loss of what is beloved and love itself, hope, identity, community, promise, homeland, physical rudiments of existence—in shell flash visions where the dead are looking upon the living in disbelief that they have ever existed, where the stars come down to the trenches at night and cannot labor their way back into the heavens in the morning. What is and what is not, what happened and what will, fall into and out of each other like political boundaries whiplashing across maps. Among the things this work has to teach Americans is that the point of even the lyric poem is not to provide a stage for the unique sensibility of the poet but to allow us to know the trauma of which we are in fact the agents, the 'timeless and universal' dispensation of might, 'where spring, too, had hidden away / fearing to set off / across meadows and woods, / to the realm of death.'" —Linda McCarriston, author of Little River