My Life as a Foreign Country
In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner was at the head of a convoy of 3,500 US soldiers as they entered the Iraqi desert.
Now, still stalked by conflict, he retraces his war experience and meditates on the echoes between his story and those of generations of soldiers marching to battle before him.
Spanning pre-deployment to combat zone, World War I to Vietnam, boredom to bloodlust, roadside bombs to open mic nights, My Life as a Foreign Country asks what it means to be a soldier and a human being.
‘The most haunting book I read this year’
Irish Times
‘His shrapnel-like chapters come at you from all angles… Compulsive’
Guardian
‘Turner is a soldier with the soul of a poet’
Daily Telegraph
‘Wrathful, wry and incantatory’
Erica Wagner, New Statesman
‘Beautiful, electrifying and full of pain’
Washington Post
Brian Turner, born in 1967, is an American poet, essayist and professor. He won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise.
Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq from November 2003 with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999-2000 he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division.