Civilians: Poems - Softcover

Dubrow, Jehanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807183725 ISBN 13: 9780807183724

Publisher: LSU Press, 2025

Synopsis

The final volume in Jehanne Dubrow’s groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians examines a significant moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service to civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dubrow’s husband came to the end of his tenure as an officer. Civilians addresses what it means when someone who has been trained for war returns from the confining, restrictive space of a naval vessel. Set amid America’s seemingly endless conflicts, Dubrow’s poems confront pressing questions about the process of transitioning to a new reality as a noncombatant: What happens to the sailor removed from a world of uniforms and uniformity? How is his language changed? His geography? And what happens to a wife once physical and emotional distances are erased and she is reunited with her husband, a man made strange and foreign by his contact with war?

Civilians is a book both shadowed by and in conversation with the classics, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’s The Trojan Women, and Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Blending formal and free verse, with materials ranging from the historical to the personal, Dubrow offers readers a candid look at the experience of watching a loved one adjust to homelife after a career of military service.

About this title

About the Author

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections and three books of nonfiction, including, most recently, Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity. She is professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807183725
• ISBN 13: 9780807183724
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 78