Turner, Brian 1967-

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Turner, Brian 1967-

PERSONAL:

Born February 12, 1967. Education: University of Oregon, M.F.A.

CAREER:

Writer, poet, and soldier. Military service: U.S. Army, served seven years, including in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq; became sergeant.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Beatrice Hawley Award, 2005; Maine Literary Award in Poetry, 2006; Northern California Book Award in Poetry, 2006; Sheila Margaret Motten Award, New England Poetry Club, 2006; PEN Center USA "Best in the West" Literary Award in Poetry, 2006; Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2006; Poet's Prize, 2007; National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry, 2007.

WRITINGS:

Here, Bullet (poetry), Alice James Books (Farmington, ME), 2005.

Contributor to books, including the Voices in Wartime Anthology. Contributor to periodicals and journals, including Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Georgia Review, ZYZZYVA, Rattle, and Atlanta Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

As an author and soldier, Brian Turner exemplifies the role of modern-day warrior-poet. A veteran of the U.S. Army, Turner spent seven years in the military. He holds an M.F.A. degree in poetry from the University of Oregon, and is the recipient of both a 2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry.

While serving in the Army, Turner served in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division from 1999 to 2000. He was deployed to Iraq in 2003, and served a year as a team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, the first Stryker brigade to be sent into the Iraqi combat zone, noted Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker. Turner became a noncommissioned offer and earned the rank of sergeant.

Most of the poems in Turner's debut poetry collection, Here, Bullet, were written during his time in Iraq. "When given time to sleep after a mission, I would often use a red lens flashlight (to avoid disturbing other exhausted soldiers) and either work on a poem or write in my journal about the day's events," Turner remarked to a reviewer on the Alice James Books Web site.

Turner readily acknowledges the incongruities between being a poet and a combat soldier, and remains aware of the apparent contradictions between the two roles. "While we were in Iraq, some soldiers in my squad knew that I often spent my downtime working on a book. However, I never shared the content with anyone while overseas," he related to the Alice James Books Web site reviewer. "People in the Army knew that he had a master's degree, but no one ever asked him what it was for," Goodyear noted, "and he saw no reason to advertise it. Noncommissioned officers, he says, are the ‘backbone of the Army,’ and ‘it's hard to be hard-nosed if you're writing poetry.’ He didn't want his underlings to think he was writing about ‘flowers and stuff like that,’" Goodyear reported.

The visceral poems in Here, Bullet are far from paeans to hearts and flowers. These works confront the violent, bloody reality of life in a combat zone, where a soldier could wake up in the morning whole and intact, and by the next day become shattered, maimed, or dead. Turner's poems explore the extremes of war through assessment of the feelings and emotions it generates, "the sense of loss, hatred, humiliation, love, uncertainty, and dreamy longing for a normal life among others," observed Library Journal critic Sadiq Alkoriji.

In the title poem, "Here, Bullet," a soldier almost belligerently addressees the enemy's projectiles, daring them to "finish what you started," and defiantly offering his own body as a target, declaring, "If a body is what you want, / then here is bone gristle and flesh." "Autopsy" contrasts death in war with the long-lost pleasures of a past life, as a "dead Soldier's heart is weighed by a mortuary affairs specialist who wonders how fast that heart once beat on the occasion of the Soldier's first kiss," commented Military Review critic Jeffrey C. Alfier. A number of Turner's works look at the war from the opposing perspective, such as in "The Al Harishma Weapons Market," where attacks against Americans are also economic transactions, and the death of an American soldier can earn immediately earn an Iraqi more than he might otherwise have been able to make in a year.

Turner "deserves our thanks for delivering in these earnest and proficient poems the kinds of observations we would never find in a Pentagon press release," remarked New York Times Book Review critics Joshua Clover and Joel Brouwer. Alfier called the collection a "poignant and brutally lucid evocation of war." His poetry "highlights the violence and death of the war in a manner little seen elsewhere," observed a Publishers Weekly critic.