my life as a foreign country by brian turner

Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire, winner of the National Book Award My Life as a Foreign Country is lyrical and restless, both ironic and profoundly empathetic. 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. Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered-a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature. My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. 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. eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace. 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…. Jen Percy - The New York Times Book Review History can only be served by this kind of attention. Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present…. praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function beautifully in nonfiction writing….

Turner also offers something that is truly rare in a memoir of violent conflict-he sees through the eyes of the enemy, imagining his way into the experience of the 'other.' Through it all, he paints a devastating portrait of what it means to be a soldier and a human being. Across time, he seeks parallels in the histories of others who have gone to war, especially his taciturn grandfather (World War II), father (Cold War), and uncle (Vietnam). Free of self-indulgence or self-glorification, his account combines recollection with the imagination's efforts to make reality comprehensible. In this breathtaking memoir, award-winning poet Brian Turner retraces his war experience-pre-deployment to combat zone, homecoming to aftermath. Now he lies awake each night beside his sleeping wife, imagining 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. In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner crossed the line of departure with a convoy of soldiers headed into the Iraqi desert. A war memoir of unusual literary beauty and power from the acclaimed poet who wrote the poem “The Hurt Locker.”

My life as a foreign country by brian turner