Brian Turner

The poet's ongoing love affair with his Central Otago home lies at the heart of this rich and compelling new collection that explores the politics of relationships and relationships themselves. Through a combination of people and place that gives the poems color and humor, the volume also examines friendship, politics, death, and the machinations of the modern business world. The mountains and lakes of the central South Island have a strong presence...

Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and Alice James' own Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), Iraqi war veteran Brian Turner writes power-fully affecting poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty, and skill. Based on Turner's yearlong tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader,...

"In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner crossed the line of departure with a convoy of soldiers headed into the Iraqi desert. Now, each night beside his sleeping wife, he imagines 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--a landscape of ongoing violence, revealing all that man has done to man. In this breathtaking memoir, Turner retraces...

"In this wide-ranging collection of essays, stories, graphic memoir, and cross-genre work, writers explore the deeply human act of kissing." -- From book jacket.