Overview

What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in Service is truth—complex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossible—about the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition that comes with returning home to find the war reduced to background noise for a remote civilian population. Bruce Lack’s forceful, authentic poetry confronts the human cost of sending young men and women to fight a war of questionable justification against an insurgency unbound by rules of engagement. Lack’s poems engage honestly with the frustration of fighting an elusive, ruthless enemy, the guilt of surviving when others do not, and the residual anger that may never leave the generation of veterans of the War on Terror. Written in the voice of the Marine but directed toward and accessible to the civilian, Service is a book that seeks to close the communication gap between the two.

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Be warned: the very title of this book is a minefield. As a euphemism for a wartime harrowing that most of us will never know, the word is an obscenity. As a description of freely chosen performance of duty, it utterly misrepresents the brutal machinery of breaking down and reconfiguration that combat demands. But there is service of another kind, which honors without falsifying, commemorates without euphemism, finds anchorage for hope while rejecting all easy amelioration. Bruce Lack has written a book of white-hot moral indictment and, impossible as that seems, of love. Read these poems. They will change you.--Linda Gregerson This is a collection of such depth, beauty, horror, and importance that to read it is to feel oneself taking part in the future. Bruce Lack writes songs of experience, but he writes beyond his experience as well, and writes for all of us. This is a poet with something to say, and one who has the vision, talent, and intelligence to say it in ways that not only make it new, but make it art.--Laura Kasischke, author of The Infintesimals There is no funny business in Service, no fragmented text, no baloney a Marine would distrust. The voice in these poems is that of a man for whom all artifice has been blown away. The searing poems of Service are heroic in the artfulness and generosity of their telling. There are boots to the sand and then there is the language of boots to the sand, the holy language of witness.--Diane Seuss, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry

Author Information

Bruce Lack served honourably in the United States Marine Corps from 2003–2007, spending twenty-one months in Fallujah, Iraq. He is a recent graduate of the Helen Zell Writer’s Program at the University of Michigan, USA. He lives in Portage, Michigan, USA, with his wife and son.

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