Overview

The final volume in Jehanne Dubrow's groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians examines a significant moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service to civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dubrow's husband came to the end of his tenure as an officer. Civilians addresses what it means when someone who has been trained for war returns from the confining, restrictive space of a naval vessel. Set amid America's seemingly endless conflicts, Dubrow's poems confront pressing questions about the process of transitioning to a new reality as a noncombatant: What happens to the sailor removed from a world of uniforms and uniformity? How is his language changed? His geography? And what happens to a wife once physical and emotional distances are erased and she is reunited with her husband, a man made strange and foreign by his contact with war? Civilians is a book both shadowed by and in conversation with the classics, including Ovid's Metamorphoses, Homer's Odyssey, Euripides's The Trojan Women, and Sophocles's Philoctetes. Blending formal and free verse, with materials ranging from the historical to the personal, Dubrow offers readers a candid look at the experience of watching a loved one adjust to homelife after a career of military service.

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9780807183724

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Reviews

""Drawing on myth--the poems invoke, for instance, Penelope and Andromache to make sense of contemporary war--Dubrow probes, with urgent and stunning imagery, how wars invade the domestic spaces of military spouses and, as one speaker puts it, that fragile 'little nation / of our marriage.' This is a brilliant, unforgettable book from one of today's most important American poets.""--Hugh Martin ""At its core, Civilians is a study of love and intimacy, separation and distance. Dubrow has written a collection that adds to the literature and provides us all a clear-eyed vision into the workings of the human heart.""--Brian Turner ""Jehanne Dubrow's Civilians embraces war and its consequences from a different kind of front line than we're used to seeing in books about armed conflict. The spouses and families of warriors from both sides were slowly forced into their own quiet cells of trauma, mostly forgotten, until now. These poems are ruggedly beautiful and enduring.""--Bruce Weigl

Author Information

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections and three books of nonfiction, including, most recently, Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity. She is professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.

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