Reviews
“Seldom have I ever read such a brutally honest depiction of warfare. Chris Collins does not shy away from the painful complexities but lets the mysteries shine through. In a voice both original and completely honest, he reveals the deep paradoxes of the human spirit. This is a powerful collection of poems.”
—David Bottoms, author of We Almost Disappear
Description
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.
“Song for a Lost Team” from My American Night
Returning to my quarters
after the chaplain’s service
for the three soldiers killed,
I laid a picture of my wife
and our two kids
on the green cot, then
cut a small groove
into my right thigh
with the sharpened
bayonet’s point—
anything, just to feel.