About this item
Highlights
- Following the loose series of Turner's other recent 2023 publications, The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem, this third book in this "collection" serves as a poetic guide to help us navigate the world we live in.
- About the Author: Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise.
- 100 Pages
- Poetry, Subjects & Themes
Description
About the Book
"Following the loose series of Turner's other recent 2023 publications, The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem, this third book in this "collection" serves as a poetic guide to help us navigate the world we live in. The Dead Peasant's Handbook begins with the difficulty and hardship of navigating the world after losing a loved one before allowing oneself to gravitate again towards delight and wonder. With deep dives into history, the poems traverse the wild terrain of our lives, and it remains ever-constant to the theme at the core of all three recent books-that of love and loss. The poems take their structure from guidebooks, featuring subject areas connected to the general experience of being human: war and conflict, dreams, love and loss, and survival. The book itself takes its title from an insurance industry policy ("Dead Peasants") in which companies can take out insurance on their workforce in case of loss or death-sometimes without employees knowing. And so, this book is also a commentary on the people and moments that are too often elided over and given the vault of silence, and maybe lost to time"--Book Synopsis
Following the loose series of Turner's other recent 2023 publications, The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem, this third book in this "collection" serves as a poetic guide to help us navigate the world we live in. The Dead Peasant's Handbook begins with the difficulty and hardship of living in the world after losing a loved one before allowing oneself to gravitate again towards delight and wonder. With deep dives into history, the poems traverse the wild terrain of our lives, and it remains ever-constant to the theme at the core of all three recent books--that of love and loss. The poems take their structure from guidebooks, featuring subject areas connected to the general experience of being human: war and conflict, dreams, love and loss, and survival. The book itself takes its title from an insurance industry policy ("Dead Peasants") in which companies can take out insurance on their workforce in case of loss or death--sometimes without employees knowing. And so, this book is also a commentary on the people and moments that are too often elided over and given the vault of silence, and maybe lost to time.Review Quotes
"...The poems are earthly, earthy. They linger like a favorite landscape or deeply felt song. I highly recommend this book. I keep it on my bedside table. I keep its lines in my mind."
--Dale Cottingham, Cider Press Review
"When I first heard Brian Turner has finally finished his long-awaited new book--I wanted to read it that very same day. Yes, I began reading right there, by the mailbox. I admire his work, yes. But why? Because in this book I can see how after artillery's fire the veteran's knowledge and regrets set the days to the rhythm and music of others' bodies' pain. But what moves me even more, as I linger among these beautiful poems is a widower's wisdom and echoing heartbreak--Turner's brilliant elegies for his late wife. What endlessly moves me, too, is the music of an aged son's watching his aged mother's forgetfulness. Such humane music is this clarity on how 'things we do' are 'ghosts we live with. How they call to us.' I love this book."
--Ilya Kaminsky
"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. 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
About the Author
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 directs the MFA program in Lake Tahoe and lives in Orlando, Florida.