The Stick Soldiers (New Poets of America) - Softcover

Martin, Hugh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1938160061 ISBN 13: 9781938160066

Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd., 2013

Synopsis

At age nineteen, Hugh Martin, a reservist, had to withdraw from college for a deployment to Iraq. After training at Fort Bragg, Martin spent 2004 in Iraq as the driver of his platoon sergeant's Humvee. He participated in hundreds of missions including raids, conducting foot patrols, clearing routes for IEDs, disposing of unexploded ordnance, and searching thousands of Iraqi vehicles. These poems recount his time in basic training, his preparation for Iraq, his experience withdrawing from school, and ultimately, the final journey to Iraq and back home to Ohio.
Hugh Martin holds an MFA from Arizona State University. He is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"This is as good as first books get... the idea that poetry can invest and transport in terms of an unlikely experience is now almost lost. Nineteenth century readers of poetry would queue up for blocks in front of the book-stalls of London publishers. Please now look at the games our children play off computer screens and ask, How can war be an unlikely experience for anyone in our culture? Hugh Martin has an answer for us." --Norman Dubie
"I am glad and made better by having Hugh Martin's version of the war in these poems, especially for their unabashed intimacy. But they are more importantly brilliantly muted poems, illustrative of the dullness that overcomes most soldiers in war; a necessary numbing of the senses that allows the temporary survival of trauma.  To accomplish this difficult task and take on the responsibility of speaking for the dead and the maimed demands a finely tuned and selfless sense of craft, and that is abundant in these poems as well, with the poet's subtle regard for a wide variety of figures of speech powerfully driven by the facts of war. Overall The Stick Soldiers is a wonderfully unconscious account of the terrible transformative power of war; poem by poem it is a sharply focused consideration of the place of our humanness in war.  This is the poetry of witness in its finest and most genuine form and it is, whether we like it or not, necessary for our survival."
--Bruce Weigl

"Here's eleven months worth of sawdust and sweat, dear reader. Somehow, Hugh Martin has wrung poetry from a scab, and now, the full shock and beauty and mystery of the things of war that won't let go will stick to you."
--Cornelius Eady, Judge

About the Author:

Hugh Martin is a graduate of Muskingum University and completed his MFA at Arizona State in May, 2012. He served six years in the Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker and spent 11 months in Iraq.

Martin's work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, and The New Republic. His chapbook, So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center.  He will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in the fall of 2012.

About this edition

• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1938160061
• ISBN 13: 9781938160066
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88