![]() ![]() ![]() Turner, who served seven years in the United States Army and has written two well-received poetry collections about his deployments to Bosnia and Iraq, 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. “My Life as a Foreign Country,” 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. It’s about dis-imagining a cultural imagination. Later it is about shedding what has been given to us, imagination as an act of deconstruction. In the beginning, war is in large part about imagination - imagining what will come. We must think ourselves into the lives of others. Empathy, after all, starts as an act of fiction. There’s a persistent idea in our culture that what we experience is “true,” while what we imagine is “untrue.” But without exploring the possibility of imagination in nonfiction, we leave out a fundamental part of the human experience - digressive wanderings, the chaotic interior self and, most important, our empathy. ![]()
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