Brutal yet reflective poems that come to grips with the horrors of war

This collection of lyric poems wrestles with a sense of self that has become fragmented by the experience of war. Christopher P. Collins has taken his tours in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, extracted their emotional shrapnel, and examined their toll on his civilian life. He considers the two sides of himself that have been wrought in these parallel lives. One is the self of the citizen-soldier, and the other is the self of the husband and father. His poems reveal the brutal ways in which these selves collide and bleed into one another.

"

“A quiet dignity runs through these poems of yet another American war and a matter-of-factness that speaks beautifully for an entire generation of American warriors called to battle by the attack on the World Trade Center. Christopher Collins takes us, with these finely honed poems, to the edge of what we can bear; the details are sometimes too much to bear, but the poet comes to this language of moral collapse honestly, and there is nothing false here, nothing done for the sake of show or drama; every word and every precise turn of phrase is devoted to bringing to our consciousness an image of war and what war does to people, poetry’s oldest subject, and he does so with a striking originality and with a fine ear.”