My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir

by Brian Turner

Overview

"Brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I’ve ever encountered." —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried

An award-winning poet and former infantry team leader in Iraq, Brian Turner combines his devastating recollections as “Sergeant Turner” with his visions of the experiences of generations of warriors in his family—and even those of the enemy—in a work of profound understanding and shocking beauty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393245028
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/08/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	698,876
File size:	468 KB

About the Author

Brian Turner is the author of the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country and the poetry collections Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. He directs the low-residency MFA at Sierra Nevada College. The Kiss was conceived with his late wife, the acclaimed poet Ilyse Kusnetz, to whom it is dedicated. It was developed from a series he curated for Guernica.

Editorial Reviews

…Brian Turner's stunning war memoir is a triumph of form and content, and a praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function beautifully in nonfiction writing. Turner…here revisits his wartime experience with extraordinary intimacy, exploring "the spaces between moments," "the gaps of memory" and the "quiet spaces of history." The book becomes a record of engagement between the self and the unknown…The memoir is not a linear representation of "real life" or an attempt to recreate it, but rather an attempt to understand it—all the while preserving its mystery. The vignettes form odd and brilliant correspondences; they match up not just through meaning but through sound and image. In this way, Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present.

The New York Times Book Review - Jen Percy

"Moments of candor and existential longing break open to expose a world of truths…Brian Turner is a born storyteller."

Yusef Komunyakaa

"Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqis—their language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives."

The New Yorker - George Packer

"In Brian Turner’s extraordinarily capable hands, language is war’s undoing, in the sense that his words won’t allow absurdity and terror to be anything less than real. My Life as a Foreign Country is lyrical and restless, both ironic and profoundly empathetic."

Mark Doty

"Turner’s poetic gaze irradiates his world…[His] memoir is beautiful, electrifying and full of pain."

Roxana Robinson

"A book…about the haunted past and a haunted man… A story of working through trauma, but above all it's a book about a man, a country, even a species beleaguered by a terrible attachment to war."

NPR - Tomas Hachard

"A brilliant fever dream of war’s surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art."

Benjamin Busch

"My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered—a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature."

Tim O'Brien

"[O]ne of the most important memoirs to come out of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…Turner’s choice to approach his own story in a way that transcends political narratives, transcends his war, and even transcends himself, makes his memoir exceptional."

The Rumpus - Caleb Cage

"Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a meditation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book."

Larry Heinemann

"Turner’s voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity…Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful."

Nick Flynn

[O]ne of the most important memoirs to come out of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…Turner’s choice to approach his own story in a way that transcends political narratives, transcends his war, and even transcends himself, makes his memoir exceptional.

Caleb Cage - The Rumpus

[A] praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function beautifully in nonfiction writing…Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present…History can only be served by this kind of attention.Man must look at what he has done. And Turner looks, brilliantly.

Jen Percy - New York Times Book Review

04/15/2014
A U.S. Army veteran and award-winning poet perhaps best known for the poem "The Hurt Locker," Turner reconstructs his wartime experience from predeployment to homecoming to offer a meditation on the soldier's life and its larger implications.

Library Journal