Brian Turner

"Many things are sinking here—a whale, a shadow, a brother, a love. Sometimes it is just how we are feeling, sometimes it is true. Turner offers us poems of a very specific form of heartbreak, 'all of it / gone now, submerged into something as simple / as the word after...' Yet this heartbreak pulls us in, moment by moment, 'moments / that gather into something / one might call a life.' By the end, it’s an elegy for a person, but also for our lives. Beautiful.”
—Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You

September 2023

ISBN: 9781949944549

Brian Turner

Shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize

“In Phantom Noise, the speaker recognizes the degree to which language is a co-creative of reality…and as such, these poems begin to interrogate the speaker’s entanglement in acts that he had heretofore largely only recorded.”
—The American Poetry Review

April 2010
ISBN: 9781882295807

Brian Turner

2006 PEN Center USA “Best in the West” Literary Award in Poetry
2005 Beatrice Hawley Award
2006 Maine Literary Award in Poetry
2006 Northern California Book Award in Poetry
2006 Sheila Margaret Motten Award from the New England Poetry Club
2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship
2007 Poets’ Prize
2008 Charity Randall Citation

“The day of the first moonwalk, my father’s college literature professor told his class, ‘Someday they’ll send a poet, and we’ll find out what it’s really like.’ Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon—the war in Iraq—and deserves our thanks…” —The New York Times Book Review

November 2005
ISBN: 9781882295555

Brian Turner

“These candid, tender, and beautiful poems bring a cosmic dimension to grief, while offering an affirming understanding of humanity’s shared experience.”
—Publishers Weekly

August 2023

ISBN: 9781949944532

Brian Turner

“Brian Turner possesses the extraordinary capacity to transform grief into art, whether intimate or collective, immediate or historical, illuminating that anguish so that we may learn, survive, even flourish in its wake. Known as a war poet, Turner writes with great moral authority on war, in ‘Historians’—about the inheritance of military mentality and machinery—or the stunning ‘Horses,’ an exploration of the tension between the beauty of these animals and the terrible uses to which they have been put, the arc over centuries from slaughter perpetuated by cavalry on the battlefield to the repression of protest in the streets. Everywhere there are the lessons of hidden history carved in images, as with ‘Vollum 14578,’ about a cruel anthrax experiment carried out on sheep. Yet, Turner believes in the redemptive power of love against death, demonstrated by the wrenching poem ‘Wedding Vows,’ and the refusal to speak the words ‘till death do us part’ as part of those vows—a refusal only validated by death, since the love stubbornly refuses to die. Again and again, Brian Turner subjects his trauma to the demands of his craft, offering the gift of lyrical consolation even when that consolation is beyond the reach of the poet.”
—Martín Espada

October 2023

ISBN: 9781949944556