The War Makes Everyone Lonely (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Barnhart, Graham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022666046X ISBN 13: 9780226660462

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2019

Synopsis

In his first collection of poems, many of which were written during his years as a US Army Special Forces medic, Graham Barnhart explores themes of memory, trauma, and isolation. Ranging from conventional lyrics and narrative verse to prose poems and expressionist forms, the poems here display a strange, quiet power as Barnhart engages in the pursuit and recognition of wonder, even while concerned with whether it is right to do so in the fraught space of the war zone. We follow the speaker as he treads the line between duty and the horrors of war, honor and compassion for the victims of violence, and the struggle to return to the daily life of family and society after years of trauma.
Evoking the landscapes and surroundings of war, as well as its effects on both US military service members and civilians in war-stricken countries, The War Makes Everyone Lonely is a challenging, nuanced look at the ways American violence is exported, enacted, and obscured by a writer poised to take his place in the long tradition of warrior-poets.

About this title

About the Author:

Graham Barnhart is a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow in the Department of Creative Writing at Stanford University.
 

Review:

"In his ruminative debut, The War Makes Everyone Lonely, Graham Barnhart documents in fugitive snapshots the service in Afghanistan and Iraq of a US Army medic, who returned to the States searching for words to describe realities that may have no words, yet require them. Keenly observant about the tension between complicity and bravery, war and the homefront, Barnhart finds himself 'dressed like the men who killed / their husbands, [passing out] sewing machines / to widows so they could make clothes / for their children and embroider cemetery flags.' Here is a poetry that performs 'Notice and Focus'—neither shrieking nor staying silent about the terrible rubble of the Terror Wars. And yet, it still dreams of waking up to nudges from horses, black garbage scrap in barbed wire, and a love that's 'so clear and thin / it couldn’t be seen.'" (Philip Metres, author of "The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance")

“Graham Barnhart’s remarkable debut collection is at once a soldier’s searing field report and a brilliant lyric response to 21st century war. With gravity, precision and grace, he writes ‘As an aggressor / aware of his complicity.’ As a medic working under fire and in the debris fields of the aftermath, he brings to his art uncommon gifts of attention and inclusion: not only combatants, but civilians, not only the ‘catalog of fire’ but ‘stillness / raveled rather than torn.’ In this age of drones and eternal occupation, Barnhart inscribes extremity anew, joining the company of those writing from the trenches of the Great War and beyond, an equal among them.” (Carolyn Forché, author of "What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance")

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 022666046X
• ISBN 13: 9780226660462
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96