Phantom noise, real war

In Phantom Noise, poet and Iraq War veteran Brian Turner chronicles the broader context of war by juxtaposing the brutality of battle with the comforts of civilian life. Turner explores the American soldier’s changing relationship with death, and why contemporary war lingers long after a safe homecoming.  Josh Cook at The Millions praised the collection for bringing the experience of the soldier close to home and defining the veteran’s struggle to embrace the contradictions of post-combat life.

From The Millions

“I embrace the frightful and the beautiful.”–Al-Bayati

In Phantom Noise, Turner creates a technical definition of the “embrace” in his epigraph included above, by showing the impossible, yet constant, juxtaposition of “frightful” memories of war with “beautiful” experiences of human existence.  As in war poetry in general, the two are present but parallel.  In “The Inventory From a Year Lived Sleeping with Bullets;” Turner twists that parallelism, “The conceptual and the physical given parallel structure,” to create another pair constantly present without intersecting.  Phantom Noise is both the first collection of poetry dealing with the soldier returning from Iraq to a life constantly between the parallel forces of war and domesticity, and Turner’s creation of an embrace that encloses them both.