In some ways 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. It haunts us, too, with the knowledge it imparts-and then mocks our attempts to claim that we can ever fully understand that knowledge. Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Neon Vernacular, winner of the Pulitzer PrizeĪ book about these haunted countries and cities, about the haunted past and a haunted man.
Moments of candor and existential longing break open to expose a world of truths…Brian Turner is a born storyteller. Larry Heinemann, author of Paco’s Story, winner of the National Book Award If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book. Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire, winner of the National Book Awardīrian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a meditation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom.
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. My Life as a Foreign Country is lyrical and restless, both ironic and profoundly empathetic. Turner’s poetic gaze irradiates his world… memoir is beautiful, electrifying and full of pain. This is a profound and beautiful work of art. 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. And Turner looks, brilliantly.Ī brilliant fever dream of war’s surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. 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. Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and The Ticking Is the Bomb
Turner’s voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity…Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful. Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqis-their language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives.
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