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A Memoir
by Brian Turner
In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner crossed the line of departure with a convoy of soldiers headed into the Iraqi desert.
Now he lies awake each night beside his sleeping wife, imagining himself as a drone aircraft, hovering over the terrains of Bosnia and Vietnam, Iraq and Northern Ireland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the death camps of Europe.
In this breathtaking memoir, award-winning poet Brian Turner retraces his war experience - pre-deployment to combat zone, homecoming to aftermath. Free of self-indulgence or self-glorification, his account combines recollection with the imagination's efforts to make reality comprehensible. Across time, he seeks parallels in the histories of others who have gone to war, especially his taciturn grandfather (World War II), father (Cold War), and uncle (Vietnam). Turner also offers something that is truly rare in a memoir of violent conflict - he sees through the eyes of the enemy, imagining his way into the experience of the "other." Through it all, he paints a devastating portrait of what it means to be a soldier and a human being.
"It was poetry that offered succor, yet Turner, in this arresting memoir, still cannot quite answer his overriding question: How does anyone leave behind a war, its deep reservoirs of trauma and ruined worlds, and somehow waltz into the rest of his life?" - Kirkus
"...this beautifully written book reflects on the effects of war not only on himself, but also on others who had served in war before, including his grandfather, father, and uncle, and also on noncombatants, most prominently his wife." - Barnes and Noble
"My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered - a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature." - Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried
"In Brian Turner's extraordinarily capable hands, language is war's undoing, in the sense that his words won't allow absurdity and terror to be anything less than real. My Life as a Foreign Country is lyrical and restless, both ironic and profoundly empathetic." - Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire, winner of the National Book Award
"Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a meditation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book." - Larry Heinemann, author of Paco's Story, winner of the National Book Award
"Turner's voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity…Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful." - Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and The Ticking Is the Bomb
"Moments of candor and existential longing break open to expose a world of truths…Brian Turner is a born storyteller." - Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Neon Vernacular, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"A brilliant fever dream of war's surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art." - Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust
This information about My Life as a Foreign Country was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brian Turner is the director of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and the prize-winning author of two poetry collections about his seven years in the United States Army. His work achieved broad awareness with the poem "The Hurt Locker." He lives in Orlando, Florida.
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