Overview

'My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered - a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature.' Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner was at the head of a convoy of 3,500 US soldiers as they entered the Iraqi desert. Now, still stalked by conflict, he retraces his war experience and meditates on the echoes between his story and those of generations of soldiers marching to battle before him. Spanning pre-deployment to combat zone, World War I to Vietnam, boredom to bloodlust, roadside bombs to open mic nights, My Life as a Foreign Country asks what it means to be a soldier and a human being. 'The most haunting book I read this year' Irish Times 'His shrapnel-like chapters come at you from all angles... Compulsive' Guardian 'Turner is a soldier with the soul of a poet' Daily Telegraph 'Wrathful, wry and incantatory' Erica Wagner, New Statesman 'Beautiful, electrifying and full of pain' Washington Post

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9780099578871

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My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered - a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature. -- Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried Contemporary wars are built on the distortion of language, the awful acronyms and euphemisms meant to screen us from the real. But in Brian Turner's extraordinarily capable hands, language is war's undoing, in the sense that these words won't allow absurdity and terror to be anything less than real. -- Mark Doty Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a mediation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book. -- Larry Heinemann, author of Paco's Story, recipient of the National Book Award. I love about My Life as A Foreign Country is its weird laugh-out-loud mood, and its in-the-thick-of-it hyper-sensual ability to capture beauty in the midst of terror. In these pages, home-spun truths sit alongside quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Walt Whitman and The Bhagavad Gita. My Life... is the melted-down language of a dream despatch from a capacious-hearted warrior poet. -- Daljit Nagra A brilliant fever dream of war's surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art. -- Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust

Brian Turner's stunning 'war memoir' is a triumph of form and content...Man must look at what he has done. And Turner looks, brilliantly -- Jen Percy * New York Times * [Turner is] a soldier with the soul of a poet...remarkable * Daily Telegraph * Wrathful, wry and incantatory -- Erica Wagner * New Statesman * Ambitious... Fascinating * Sunday Times * His shrapnel-like chapters come at you from all angles... [A] most compulsive of survivor's tales * Guardian * An uncompromising story of violence and beauty, searing trauma and a dreamlike circulation between the past and the present... This marvellous memoir is his poetic message, floating gently towards us -- Joanna Bourke * Sunday Telegraph * Vivid... The war on the ground and the conflict in the head are combined in a work of art -- Iain Finlayson * The Times * The most haunting book I read this year -- Lia Mills * Irish Times *

Author Information

Brian Turner, born in 1967, is an American poet, essayist and professor. He won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise. Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq from November 2003 with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999-2000 he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division.

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