Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Slow War

Slow War

Hertwig, Benjamin

Paperback

Series: Hugh MacLennan Poetry, Book 40

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773551425
ISBN13: 9780773551428
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Aug 14 2017
Pages: 134
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.00 Depth: 7.50
Language: English

Benjamin Hertwig's debut collection of poetry, Slow War, is at once an account of contemporary warfare and a personal journey of loss and the search for healing. It stands in the tradition of Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est and Kevin Powers's Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.

A century after the First World War, Hertwig presents both the personal cost of war in poems such as Somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan and Food Habits of Coyotes, as Determined by Examination of Stomach Contents, and the potential for healing in unlikely places in A Poem Is Not Guantánamo Bay. This collection provides no easy answers - Hertwig looks at the war in Afghanistan with the unflinching gaze of a soldier and the sustained attention of a poet. In his accounting of warfare and its difficult aftermath on the homefront, the personal becomes political.

While these poems inhabit both experimental and traditional forms, the breakdown of language channels a descent into violence and an ascent into a future that no longer feels certain, where history and trauma are forever intertwined. Hertwig reminds us that remembering war is a political act and that writing about war is a way we remember.

Also in

General Poetry

View All