Black Butterflies over BaghdadBy: David Allen SullivanPublished: Oct. 2021 (The Word Works) Building on his earlier poetry collection about U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq (Every Seed of the Pomegranate, 2012) David Allen Sullivan, poet-laureate of Santa Cruz,...
2034: A Novel of the Next World WarBy: Elliot Ackerman and James StavridisPublished: March 2021 (Penguin Press) In a culture saturated with eco-dystopian future fantasies, a novel about the next world war on a still mostly functioning planet is as startling as it is...
Charité at WarDirected by Anno SaulRelease Date (Streaming): June, 2019 (Netflix) Charité at War, a Netflix series directed by Anno Saul, recounts the period before and during the last major battle of WWII, the Battle of Berlin, as lived by the medical personnel at...
Cold Case Hammarskjöld Director: Mads BrüggerReleased: Aug. 16, 2019 (United States) It’s hard not to have noticed that documentary film—a genre once reviled for its standard fare of eat-your-vegetables instructional films—is enjoying a creative and commercial...
The War Makes Everyone LonelyBy: Graham Barnhart Published: Nov. 2019 (University of Chicago Press) Kill ClassBy:Nomi StonePublished: Feb. 2019 (Tupelo Press) Graham Barnhart’s The War Makes Everyone Lonely and Nomi Stone’s Kill Class both meticulously render the...
Wolf Lamb BombBy: Aviya KushnerPublished: June 1, 2021 (Orison Books) Wolf Lamb Bomb, by Aviya Kushner, reminds me of my Jewish friend’s warning to her young daughter: “Remember, no matter where you are, you are never safe.” This dread runs like an emotional third...
The Latitude of a MercyBy: Stefan LovasikPublished: April 2020 (The New York Quarterly Foundation) With his new book, The Latitude of a Mercy, Stefan Lovasik confronts the nightmarish realities of combat and lingering effects of combat-induced trauma. In poem after...
Editor’s Note: At the end of this review are three poems from I Will Not Name It Except to Say that Consequence previously published. Toward the end of I Will Not Name It Except to Say, there is a poem in which Lee Sharkey recapitulates and partially rewrites...
Battle Dress: PoemsBy Karen Skolfield (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019)Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry At seventeen years old, Karen Skolfield joined the Army. For seven years she served as a journalist. Now she teaches poetry to engineers. In plain...
Teresa Fazio’s memoir, Fidelis, is the story of agency, power struggles, and life lessons learned on a young Marine’s deployment and over the years after she returns. Her experience places her narrative within the scope of widely varied war literature such as Karen...
