A series of poems about the author’s experiences as a soldier in Iraq, which together sum up the price of war and this war in particular.
‘In the Leupold Scope,’ where the narrator is looking through a spotting scope at a woman hanging laundry
She is dressing the dead
The narrator, by inference, just hasn’t shot the people who will wear those clothes yet.
In ‘AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)’, a wounded soldier dies on her way to Germany
a way of dealing with the fact
that Thalia Fields is gone, long gone,
about as far from Mississippi
as she can get, ten thousand feet above Iraq
with a blanket draped over her body
and an exhausted surgeon in tears…
In ‘2000 lbs.’ Turner writes of a suicide bombing in Mosul using multiple viewpoints, beginning with the bomber
his thumb trembling over the button.”
followed by a taxi driver
…he regrets how so much can go wrong in a life,
how easily the years slip by…
a National Guardsman
…it’s just as well his eardrums ruptured
because it lends the world a certain calm…
and others, coming full circle back to the bomber
who may have invoked the Prophet’s name,
or not…
‘2000 lbs.’ is better at showing you what a suicide bombing is like than any photograph or video you ever saw.
In “Night in Blue’ Turner says
I have no words to speak of war.
You may beg to differ when you read this book.
One cranky note, because you know that’s how I roll: Here, Bullet is all free verse, with nary a sonnet or even any blank verse (Yes, I scanned some.) to be found. What ever happened to form in poetry?