My Life as a Foreign Country A Memoir [Hardcover]

In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner crossed the line of departure with a convoy of soldiers headed into the Iraqi desert.[A] praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function beautifully in nonfiction writing&. Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present&. History can only be served by this kind of attention. Man must look at what he has done. And Turner looks, brilliantly.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&. [His] eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace.Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqistheir language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives.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.?Turner's voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity&Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful.A brilliant fever dream of war's surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art.A book&about the haunted past and a haunted man& A story of working through trauma, but above all it's a book about a man, a country, even a species beleaguered by a terrible attachment to war.The psychological consequences of war are movingly portrayed& [a] standout.A war memoir of unusual literary beauty and power fromthe acclaimed poet who wrote the poem The Hurt Locker.