Apostle of Desire

by Bruce Weigl

Overview

Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of America’s most revered military veteran writers —Bruce Weigl brings readers face-to-face with our country’s legacy of violence, the suffering of combat PTSD, and what it means to be truly haunted.

Taking its cue from James Wright’s goal to write “the poetry of a grown man,” the poems in Apostle of Desire juxtapose the peace and comfort offered by the natural world with the bruising intensity of manmade violence. These sudden tonal shifts express a vulnerability and extremity of feeling that strips audiences’ own emotions bare, leading readers to question their roles as bystanders and consumers of violent media.

In sharing his intertwining feelings of love and shame for both country and self, Weigl places readers into the role of the watcher and opens a window into the traumas of the Vietnam War and life’s daily battles with PTSD. The honesty of Weigl’s poetry exposes the ghosts of pain while still witnessing the glories of love, nature, and his ongoing experiences with the rich daily life of contemporary Vietnam.

Readers will face the solitude of regret and the hopeful pursuit of redemption—remembering the past and looking toward the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781960145697
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Pages:	109
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Bruce Weigl is the author of over twenty books of poetry, translations and essays, most recently Among Elms, in Ambush (BOA, 2021). The Abundance of Nothing (Northwestern UniversityPress, 2012), which was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, and Harpers, among a wide variety of magazines and journals. Weigl lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

Read an Excerpt

Loving the Thái Bình River Ghosts

 

I know this Hồ Chí Minh City

rain

is no different than rain anywhere else

once you get right down to the rain-ness of things,

although it falls from the sky

across the south China Sea

in drops as large as rice bowls.  I know

 

even this far from home there are ghosts,

but the dead all speak the same language. Speak to me in your language,

rattle your bones to make a beat

that carries us away.

Table of Contents

To the Reader

My Corona Landslide

Loving the Jungle Blues

Tender Lotus

The Preponderance of the Great Splitting Apart,

(Homage to Emily D.)

Mưa Xuân

Written the Day Mr. X Left Prison

Thinking About Her

Outside of Quảng Trị City, 1968

All that I Need

Verse Thirteen

Evening Before Desire in Hà Nội

Victim of Love

The First Time I Heard Your Name it was Different

Autumn, End of Everything

Attending a Meeting of High Officials

The Dangers of Searching the Photographs of Renato Sandoval

Sky

Epistolary to a Brother

How Odd Our Grief

The New Road Neighborhood Showdown

Empty

A Simple Lesson

Why I Love my Doctor

Here I am

My Bill Evans

Small Autumn Festival Song for Xia Lu

Loving the Thai Binh River Ghosts

The Quality of Mental Health Care at the VA

The Inevitability of Things

Why I Flunked Philosophy 301

Being and Listening

Waiting for my Father’s Bus

Bodies

Tôi đi bộ quanh hồ Hà Lê

Weight of Rain

The Ambiguity of his Intentions

Apostle of Desire

Homage to the Gecko

Saying Goodbye to Achill

A Vision

Uvalde

The Names of Loss in English

I Went Mental

For Bella, Dancing

An English Novel

Whoever They Were

The Lake Will Take You Home

Monk at Trấn Quốc Pagoda

The History of the Blues in Hà Nội

Hồ Gươm Romance

Hàng Khay Rain

Hồ Gươm Moment

Our Fear of Hồ Gươm

Berserk

Now, Unattached

Some Words for my Grandchildren

Marching with the Dead on Bà Triệu

A Brief Epistemology of Longing

The Priority of Paradigms for Her

In the Presence of Sympathetic Ghosts

Dark Barges Churn the River White in the Moon

Meditation at Bao Vinh Among Roses

What Nhung Wrote Down

Temporal Reality Take Out for A.

Red Bridge on Hoan Kiem Lake

Night Message, From a Friend

Going Back

An Ars Poetica

Notes

Editorial Reviews

Bruce Weigl’s 15th collection of poetry, Apostle of Desire, reminds me what people were feeling in 1968, blood in our streets and in the streets of Vietnam, where your brother, father, son—or you—faced deadly combat. Weigl was an 18-year old Ohio soldier who saw and participated in unshakable human damage. He became, afterward, the preeminent poet of the experience Americans have tried for decades to dodge. From the start, his poetry’s love of country, and outrage at our failed national morality, echoed Whitman and Melville; the shock and despair those giants turned into art, their pleas for the future. Apostle of Desire is Bruce Weigl’s chronicle of how one veteran has carried on a singular postwar détente, including intense and multiple returns to Vietnam and years spent engaging its culture, life, citizens, shrines, dreams, and especially poets, translating and publishing them in the US, marrying the two languages as redemption. His stories of how it felt to come home a pariah and a hero, depending on who was talking, compose a hard misery that has not yet ended, but his mature poetry becomes a celebration of Vietnam’s rivers, mists, flowers, hand-holding lovers, children, and abundant and joyful human-ness. Weigl’s poems are—make no mistake—tough, unflinching, and demanding in his quest for self-reclamation. That’s what our country trained him to be. But what most stands out in Apostle of Desire is a kind of holiness like the songs of monks, and that barbed, witty, lonesome knowledge only deeply examined experience provides. Whitman’s. Melville’s. I think Apostle of Desire is what poet James Wright meant when he said he wanted to write the poetry of a grown man. This complex, serious book is about American conduct. It is grown-up and splendid.”—Dave Smith, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry

From the Publisher