Poems and Prose from the Vietnam War: And Then from Then to Now

Poems and Prose from the Vietnam War: And Then from Then to Now
Author: Donald R. Edwards
Publisher:
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2014-12-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781478740063

Don says he now days Lives where he is at. That he writes from the heart He says that's a fact What he's said is no more Than what's come mind As he's traveled through space For all of this time He started this book About half a century ago But he gave up on sharing For the interest you showed So he has written for himself for his own peace of mind Now he's giving it to you and hopes your peace you'll find

Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees

Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees
Author: Laren McClung
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0393354296

Descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees confront the aftermath of war and, in verse and prose, deliver another kind of war story. Fifty years after the Vietnam War, this anthology by descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees—American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese Diaspora, Hmong, Australian, and others—confronts war and its aftermath. What emerges is an affecting portrait of the effects of war and family—an intercultural, generational dialogue on silence, memory, landscape, imagination, Agent Orange, displacement, postwar trauma, and the severe realities that are carried home. Including such acclaimed voices as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Karen Russell, Terrance Hayes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Nick Flynn, and Ocean Vuong, Inheriting the War enriches the discourse of the Vietnam War and provides a collective conversation that attempts to transcend the recursion of history. “Each unique work in Inheriting the War embraces a collective that aims to engage through some daring and passionate truths calibrated by bravery.” —Yusef Komunyakaa, from the foreword

Fragments

Fragments
Author: Bruce Berger
Publisher: WordWorthyPress, LLC
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2020-05-30
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 098550482X

Bruce Berger, the author, finally came home 50 years after the Vietnam war when his memories crystallized into the 34 poems in this chapbook. He shipped to Vietnam as an Infantryman in 1970 but was assigned most of the year to the Casualty Branch of the 101st Airborne Division at Camp Eagle, near Phu Bai. As “next-of-kin” editor, he wrote hundreds of sympathy letters to grieving families back home for loss of their soldier, and sometimes helped gather fallen brothers on battle grounds to begin their long journeys home. Through this lens, his poems evoke an overwhelming sense of loss on many fronts: the brave American soldiers who gave their lives in the long war; a village of South Vietnamese widows; the thousands of bui doi, innocent but reviled half-breed (Amerasian) children; the empty afterness of battle grounds and burials; the long, deadly reach of Agent Orange and PTSD into veterans’ lives still today; and the thunderous silence of missing parades back home. Writing these poems brought him home. Many of the poems are illustrated with artwork created by members of the Providence Art Club in Rhode Island. All earnings from this book will be donated to the Vietnam Veterans of America. Book Review 1: "This is war as never seen before; raw feelings of senseless loss as never recorded before; a glimpse into the heart of a compassionate soldier, amidst the brutality of Vietnam, as never expressed before. Emotion jumps from its pages and sticks. A mosaic of war’s stark realities, then and now, stays with you long after the words sink in. You may put the book down, but you cannot escape its message. Regardless of who you are, this book will move you. For the veteran, expect a return to the killing fields in snatches of memories and rumblings of long-suppressed fear, anger, guilt and loss. For families of those lost during the war comes an understanding your grief does not go unnoticed and your eternal emptiness is understood and respected. And, for the uninitiated, who think of war in terms of a brief sound bite on the evening news—this is a hard life lesson: A single gunshot in a nameless piece of jungle can claim a life in a second and change countless other lives, half-way around the world, forever. Lastly, this is a courageous, deeply personal, discussion of inner battles many of us face. To many veterans, living with the war for decades after returning is so hard and so easily misunderstood. This book takes a giant step towards that understanding and awareness. All veterans will be better because of it.” -- Rick St. John, author of the acclaimed Circle of Helmets and Tiger Bravo’s War, and a retired U.S. Army Colonel who led a company of 101st Airborne Division paratroopers in heavy fighting in Vietnam. Book Review 2: “Fires in some men, like fires deep in forest roots, can burn for decades. Fragments paints such a fire in the metaphor of a journey for those who flew home but not home after a long, bloody, bitter war in Vietnam that often did not end with a warrior’s return to American soil. Berger’s pieces are like fragmentary grenades and flashbangs, images and lines that catch in your throat, stop your breath, blind you with tears. Like the image of a gravedigger back home whose ‘heart leaks into the grave’ he digs for his brother … Or the poem ‘66 Miles,’ the distance you get when you place 58,220 dead head-to-toe, head-to-toe, ‘the length of a trip from Nogales to Tucson, or Trenton to the Big Apple.’ Think about that … and then they came home to no parades, only pockets of seething scorn. Years later they hear the meaningless koan, ‘Thank you for your service.’ Welcome home, my friend, welcome home.” -- Joseph Heywood, author of more than 20 books and perhaps best known for the Woods Cop Mystery Series. He served five years in the Air Force as a navigator, spending 15 months in the Vietnam theater Book Review 3: "This is an important book. In a collection of poems he calls ‘fragments,’ Bruce K. Berger gives us an incisively moving—often heartbreaking—record of the Vietnam war, which left permanent scars on the minds and bodies of those who served and suffered there, then endured what Berger calls ‘the long coming home.’ The poems are vivid, unsentimental, sharply evocative of the places and the people—combatants and noncombatants on both sides, victims of the war’s horrors both in country and back home. This is an important book. You need to read it. Insistent, unforgettable, its poems will frag your heart.” -- Arnold Johnston, author of Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been and The Witching Voice: A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns.

From Both Sides Now

From Both Sides Now
Author: Phillip Mahony
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1998
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

A collection of poetry from Vietnamese and American poets about the different experiences each country went through during the Vietnam War.

Circle of Helmets

Circle of Helmets
Author: Rick St John
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-09-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9780998854243

Circle of Helmets is a glimpse into the inner core of a young soldier at war and how it has changed him over the years---a coming of age odyssey, from ingenuous soldier to hardened veteran. Told through battlefield accounts written by the young soldier just hours after actual combat, coupled with intense poems about that combat experience from the same man, some thirty years later, it is a story you will not forget. "Riveting, poignant and full of incredible accounts and insights, this book brings the experience of the Vietnam War to life in a way that is absolutely unforgettable. I cannot recommend it enough." Andrew Carroll, editor of War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars. "A searingly personal anthology . . . an important contribution to our understanding of the war and those who fought it." Rick Atkinson, author of The Liberation Trilogy.

Memories of a Lost War

Memories of a Lost War
Author: Subarno Chattarji
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2001
Genre: American poetry
ISBN: 019818767X

In this unique and significant addition to Vietnam studies, Memories of a Lost War analyzes the poems written by American veterans, protest poets, and Vietnamese, within political, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. Drawing on a wealth of material often published in small presses and journals, the book highlights the horrors of war and the continuing traumas of veterans in post-Vietnam America. In its inclusion of Vietnamese perspectives, the book marks a departure from earlier works that have largely concentrated on Vietnam as a war rather than a country.

Poetry On War

Poetry On War
Author: Sean Cetta
Publisher:
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2021-06-14
Genre:
ISBN:

Throughout the book, the perspective is the author's, first as a Vietnam GI in the thick of the early, low-intensity war, then later as a Vietnamese-speaking civilian contractor. John Buquoi bore witness from the fateful year of 1963 until the end of his extended stay in-country in 1970. Now from the distance of time and reflection, the poet looks back nearly half a century with grace, insight, and occasional bittersweet moments. A notable collection of poems that takes its rightful place on the shelf of distinguished Vietnam War literature.

A Book Of Poetry On War In Vietnam

A Book Of Poetry On War In Vietnam
Author: Flossie Murelli
Publisher:
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2021-06-14
Genre:
ISBN:

Throughout the book, the perspective is the author's, first as a Vietnam GI in the thick of the early, low-intensity war, then later as a Vietnamese-speaking civilian contractor. John Buquoi bore witness from the fateful year of 1963 until the end of his extended stay in-country in 1970. Now from the distance of time and reflection, the poet looks back nearly half a century with grace, insight, and occasional bittersweet moments. A notable collection of poems that takes its rightful place on the shelf of distinguished Vietnam War literature.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Author: Ocean Vuong
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525562044

The instant New York Times Bestseller • Nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction “A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. Named a Best Book of the Year by: GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!

Sleeping with the Dead

Sleeping with the Dead
Author: William Daniel Ehrhart
Publisher:
Total Pages: 48
Release: 2006
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

Poetry. W.D. Ehrhart--a veteran of the Vietnam War--has written 14 books of poetry and prose, as well as 10 poetry chapbooks. SLEEPING WITH THE DEAD is a work of frustration, aggression, and compassion. Lyrical yet gritty, the poems in this collection begin with meditations/lamentations on death before moving on to examine love. A dialectic exists between what Ehrhart truly feels and believes with what he experienced as a young Marine. Ehrhart's work examines the political context--both then and now--in regard to war and death, but ultimately seeks a sense of peace and forgiveness, for others and for himself.