Phantom Noise

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Overview

In the aftermath of best-selling Here, Bullet, Brian Turner deftly illuminates existence as both easily extinguishable and ultimately enduring. These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

"Each night is different. Each night the same./ Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don't." Turner fascinated and unsettled many with his first collection, Here, Bullet, featuring poems of wide-eyed wonder and honest introspection from the frontlines of the war in Iraq. This volume continues his mission, bringing the hard realities of war and its consequences home. "Some nights I twitch and jerk in my sleep./ My lover has learned to face away." Turner's intention is neither to romanticize nor to protest the war but simply to bring its ironies and madness, its sad and difficult truths, into the light—a light that perhaps will exorcise the demons. "I imagine/ she's far away and we don't use the word love.// While she sleeps, helicopters/ come in low over the date palms." The telling of these stories would seem to demand as much courage as having lived them. In sharp, straightforward, yet lyrical language, Turner exposes the many costs of war. Perhaps the most costly: there can be no forgetting some sights and sounds. VERDICT Highly recommended for all readers of contemporary poetry and to those interested in war literature.—Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia

Courtney Cook

These poems work a bit like the bomb blasts that echo through them, breaking down assumptions, unearthing shards of insight that help explain why, when it comes to war, we are so much at odds with ourselves…It's hard to think of a better way around ideology than poetry like this. Turner shows us soldiers who are invincible and wounded, a nation noble and culpable, and a war by turns necessary and abominable. He brings us closer to our own phantom guilt and speaks the words that we both do and do not want to hear.
—The Washington Post

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Dana Jennings

Mr. Turner's poems can be too prosy, but we need his bracing "bullet-borne language" as he tries to reconcile the chaos of Iraq with the demands of the poetic line.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Turner’s debut, Here, Bullet (2006) was likely the most discussed debut of the decade: its sharp, accessible verse reflected Turner’s U.S. Army service in wartime Iraq. It’s a hard act to follow, but Turner manages well, alternating poems about his uneasy return to civilian life in California with attempts to understand Iraq and Iraqis from the very recent past to the long sweep of Arabic poetry and history. Turner the veteran sees war everywhere—plywood “At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center” cracks like mortars; a flight in a small civilian plane reminds him of a troop transport, “my view a distorted globe,/ my reflection in it moonless, culpable.” Poems on his childhood and on American places emphasize undercurrents of violence, premonitions of military life. But Turner also displays his anguished interest in Arab experience. “Ash blackened the sky in 1258, blood/ ran in the rivers of Dajla and Farat.” At their best, his poems feel like personal essays, driven by reminiscence or reportage. Yet the epic past cannot obscure the troubled present—not in the “Mosul airbase” where Turner guarded a huddle of blindfolded prisoners, not in Iraqi cities with their distressed children, not even in the Pacific forest where the volume concludes: “there is not one thing I might say to the world,” Turner says, “which the world does not already know.” (Apr.)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781882295807
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication date: 4/1/2010
Pages: 112
Sales rank: 536,869
Product dimensions: 7.14 (w) x 9.04 (h) x 0.36 (d)

Meet the Author

Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving with the US Army as an infantry team leader in Iraq. He has been featured on National Public Radio, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and the BBC. He has received an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

Read an Excerpt

From "Discotheque":

Late at night, Jackowski and I taped the flex-charge
to the gate. I unspooled the shock tube, removed the safety.
Hathaway radioed the countdown—and at zero—

I pulled the pin. It was me, Sgt. Turner,
who cracked the night open with explosives
and wrote it all down, word by word.

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Phantom Noise

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Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Courtney Cook

Dana Jennings

Publishers Weekly

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