In Country by Hugh Martin

In Country by Hugh Martin

Hugh Martin's second full-length poetry collection moves within and among history to broaden and complicate our understanding of war. These poems push beyond tidy generalizations and easy moralizing as they explore the complex, often tense relationships between U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The speaker journeys through training to deployment and back again, returning home to reflect on the soldiers and civilians--both memories and ghosts--left behind. Filled with recollected dialogue and true-to-life encounters, these poems question, deconstruct, examine, and reintegrate the myths and realities of service.

This is a poetry of small detail and large designAt one level, the guns, wasted terrains, and grinding dailiness of violence surprise and engage. The meticulous craft of detail allows the reader to become both witness and participant. But at a deeper level, the true power and presence of this book, from poem to poem, lies in its offering of the unimaginable to imagination. These are certainly war poems, providing depth and texture to the category. But they are also proof of the hard-won accord that can exist between experience and language, which here lends a memorable force to so many of these poems.” —Eavan Boland

“With war, the imagination is drawn to spectacle, which these poems are not—and in that way, they help us to understand the unspectacular horror of the regular. ‘There was never that black bowling ball, a burning fuse / waving its tail,’ is clear enough, but followed with the more devastating extension of experience, ‘No bombs but / in things.’ These clearly important poems disabuse us from thinking of war as we may have—as games, as movies, as acts of what we are convinced is the imagination, having played war as kids. These poems change the reader by offering drama where it is least expected. They are not imagined.” —Alberto Ríos

“In Country is an astonishing tapestry. I know Randall Jarrell would have loved to review this book, detailing the half-dozen obvious masterpieces—insisting that human memory elevated by the most talented writers has something of the sacraments in it. Human, brilliant, this is truly yet another important book by Hugh Martin.” —Norman Dubie

Hugh Martin grew up in northeast Ohio and served six years in the Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker. A veteran of the Iraq War, Hugh is the author of In Country (BOA Editions, 2018), The Stick Soldiers (BOA Editions, 2013, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize) and So, How Was the War (Kent State University Press, 2010). He carries degrees from Muskingum University and Arizona State University. A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Fellowship, and a Yaddo Residency, he was the inaugural winner of the Iowa Review Jeff Sharlet Award for Veterans. His essays and poetry have appeared in PBS NewsHour, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Grantland, American Poetry Review, and The Kenyon Review. He was the 2014-15 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and is currently teaching at Ohio University where he’s completing a Ph.D in creative writing.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781942683704
ISBN 10	1942683707
Title	In Country
Author	Hugh Martin
Series	American Poets Continuum
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	BOA Editions, Limited
Year published	2018-12-20
Number of pages	104
Prizes	Winner of A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize 2012 (United States)
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.