Brian Turner and Bruce Weigl, 5 March 2008 – Audio

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 5, 2008.

Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection. His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology. Here, Bullet is a harrowing, beautiful first-person account of the Iraq war featuring poems that reflect Turner’s experiences as a soldier. The poems speak with compassion, sympathy, and horror of the first-hand experience of war and with immediacy of loss, beauty, comradeship, and longing for home and the familiar; he deplores the violence and acknowledges the grief and terror of war.

Bruce Weigl is the author of 12 collections of poetry, most recently Declension in the Village of Chung Luong which created “an eloquent spokesman for an entire generation of Americans whose lives were broken by the war and a country whose moral confusion desperately needed addressing.” His memoir, The Circle of Hahn, tells of his childhood in Ohio; his induction into the U.S. Army in 1967, and year in Vietnam that led to his passion for that country’s poetry and culture; and of a redemptive meeting in 1996 with his daughter-to-be at an orphanage outside Hanoi. He also has three collections of essays as well as translating and publishing books of Vietnamese poetry. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harpers, and many other publications. In 2006 he was awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.