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Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong

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Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong

Paperback(1st ed)

$14.95

Paperback(1st ed)
$14.95

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Overview

Poems about the Vietnam War, its aftermath, and a veteran coming to terms with his place in postwar society.

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About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781880684207
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	07/01/1995
Series:	Curbstone Press Contemporary Poets Series
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	63
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Kevin Bowen currently serves as Director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass-Boston. The Progressive magazine chose Bowen's first book, Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong as "Pick of the Year." He lives in Dorchester, MA with his wife and two children.

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Editorial Reviews

"...a book of poems that unlock their beauty slowly..." —Harvard Review

"It's a beautiful book, one I'll always treasure." —Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

"Beautiful. Bowen captures the spirituality of Vietnam." —Oliver Stone

"[The poems] are all informed by Bowen's reflective sensibility, and they are all etched with precision and grace." —The Progressive

"In his invaluable poetry, Kevin Bowen takes us through our war in Vietnam. He tells the terrible and awful truth of it. Reading these poems gives us the understanding and compassion to end that war and come home." —Maxine Hong Kingston

"Take this book into a quiet place...Let these poems go like sunlight to your heart." —Larry Heinemann, author of Paco's Story

"This is a different kind of Vietnam book; this collection evolves around a natural empathy between actors on a human stage that's almost mythic in scope and concerns... This poetry is shaped out of a love for people, as well as a painful passion garnered from the experience of war. One feels that a witness is sharing heartfelt moments when reading." —Yusef Komunyakaa

From the Publisher

This is a groundbreaking book about the Vietnam War that shows deep compassion for people rather than simply displaying brutality like so many other books on the subject of war, particularly this war. Witness these lines from "Song in the Green Light": "A young girl sings in the green light,/songs of leaves on the river, evening rain./She strains to keep time with the boy/who fights the feedback of his bass./Her voice, so clear, holds the strength/of her song high out over the audience." A mystic collection of poetry from a witness, this book serves as a poetic history of the Vietnam war from a new perspective. Each poem in this collection moves quietly into the next one, grabbing the reader's heart. Highly recommended.-Lenard D. Moore, "Shawensis," Shaw Univ., Raleigh, N.C.

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