The Dead Peasant's Handbook

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Brian Turner

“Brian Turner possesses the extraordinary capacity to transform grief into art, whether intimate or collective, immediate or historical, illuminating that anguish so that we may learn, survive, even flourish in its wake. Known as a war poet, Turner writes with great moral authority on war, in ‘Historians’—about the inheritance of military mentality and machinery—or the stunning ‘Horses,’ an exploration of the tension between the beauty of these animals and the terrible uses to which they have been put, the arc over centuries from slaughter perpetuated by cavalry on the battlefield to the repression of protest in the streets. Everywhere there are the lessons of hidden history carved in images, as with ‘Vollum 14578,’ about a cruel anthrax experiment carried out on sheep. Yet, Turner believes in the redemptive power of love against death, demonstrated by the wrenching poem ‘Wedding Vows,’ and the refusal to speak the words ‘till death do us part’ as part of those vows—a refusal only validated by death, since the love stubbornly refuses to die. Again and again, Brian Turner subjects his trauma to the demands of his craft, offering the gift of lyrical consolation even when that consolation is beyond the reach of the poet.”
—Martín Espada

October 2023

ISBN: 9781949944556

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Available in both print and digital formats.

Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. His memoir My Life as a Foreign Country was published in 2014. He’s the editor of The Kiss, and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, and other fine journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando with Dene, the world's sweetest golden retriever.