My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir

by Brian Turner

Overview

A war memoir of unusual literary beauty and power from the acclaimed poet who wrote the poem “The Hurt Locker.”

In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner crossed the line of departure with a convoy of soldiers headed into the Iraqi desert.

Now he lies awake each night beside his sleeping wife, imagining himself as a drone aircraft, hovering over the terrains of Bosnia and Vietnam, Iraq and Northern Ireland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the death camps of Europe.

In this breathtaking memoir, award-winning poet Brian Turner retraces his war experience—pre-deployment to combat zone, homecoming to aftermath. Free of self-indulgence or self-glorification, his account combines recollection with the imagination's efforts to make reality comprehensible. Across time, he seeks parallels in the histories of others who have gone to war, especially his taciturn grandfather (World War II), father (Cold War), and uncle (Vietnam). Turner also offers something that is truly rare in a memoir of violent conflict—he sees through the eyes of the enemy, imagining his way into the experience of the "other." Through it all, he paints a devastating portrait of what it means to be a soldier and a human being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393245011
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/15/2014
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

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

The author of this powerful memoir possesses rare credentials. Brian Turner is both an award-winning poet and a former Iraqi War combat brigade leader. Perhaps not surprisingly, his My Life as a Foreign Country is far more than a battle-by-battle history of his overseas experiences. Instead, this beautifully written book reflects on the effects of war not only on himself, but also on others who had served in war before, including his grandfather, father, and uncle, and also on noncombatants, most prominently his wife. (P.S. Turner's book earned enthusiastic reviews from Discover readers.)

…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

"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

"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

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

2014-07-13
In his surpassingly sad and disquieting memoir, poet Turner (Phantom Noise, 2010, etc.) has rendered an unusual anomaly: cogent delirium. Some have said a poet should join astronauts in space so we could know what it's really like. In Turner, we have sent a poet to war, and we are much closer to knowing its kaleidoscopic face; as profound sympathy washes over the reader, so does the war's horror. Alternately stark and surreal, Turner's chronicle is a textured confluence of the ages, connected by classic verse, history and arresting metaphor. He surveys a landscape of ghosts from all of humanity's wars, wraiths who walk the streets and battlefields and rise like mist from the rivers. Throughout, he is haunted by moral ambiguities. On the ground, or in dreams hovering above the fray, Turner has the acuity to see through others' eyes: a bomb maker, quietly assembling "Death's cold and metallic invitation"; an Iraqi doctor surveying the carnage; a child kissing her father's cheek; a Turkish cook, dying. The author locates the intoxication and pathology of war in a wild terrain "where profound questions are given a violent and inexorable response," a realm bereft of reason where generation after generation of soldiers have marched to oblivion or lasting anguish. Why did a man of such sensitivity and clarity of perception feel compelled to fight in Iraq, even when he knew it made no sense? Turner doesn't know, and he dismisses each of the motivations as delusions. But, marinated in the martial ethic of his father, the author joined the infantry, prepared to be "low, cold and reptilian" and to live with fear. It was poetry that offered succor, yet Turner, in this arresting memoir, still cannot quite answer his overriding question: How does anyone leave behind a war, its deep reservoirs of trauma and ruined worlds, and somehow waltz into the rest of his life?

Kirkus Reviews

"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 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

"[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