Apostle of Desire

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• Havingfought in the American War in Vietnam (Quang Tri, 1967-1968), Bruce Weigl hasbeen working to promote mutual understanding and reconciliation between Vietnamand the US via literature and cultural exchanges for over twenty years.
• One of the most popular andinfluential living military veteran poets, Bruce Weigl draws on his personalexperience serving during the Vietnam War. The poems in this collectioncontinue to seek, in the poet's own words, "the beauty of a thing saidstraight" while exploring how both memories of the war and Weigl's ongoingrelationship with the people of Vietnam continue to evolve with age.
• Apostle of DesireisWeigl's fifteenth collection of poetry, and his 4^th book with BOAEditions. His previous collections with BOA includes Among the Elms in Ambush (2021), On the Shore of Welcome Home(2019),and the translation of Nguyen Phan Que Mai'sThe Secret of Hoa Sen(2013).
• Weiglhas also written several collections of critical essays, has publishedtranslations of Vietnamese and Romanian poetry, and has also edited orco-edited several anthologies of war poetry.
• Weigl is one of six poets featuredin the 2015 documentary filmPoetry of Witness, which interviewssix contemporary poets who have survived such extremities as war, torture,exile, and repression. The other poets profiled in the documentary are CarolynForch (Salvadoran Civil War), Saghi Ghahraman (Iranian Revolution), FadyJoudah (Doctors Without Borders), Claudia Serea (Socialist Republic ofRomania), and Mario Susko (Bosnian War).

Reviews

BruceWeigls 15th collection of poetry,Apostle of Desire, reminds me what people were feeling in 1968, blood in our streets and in the streets of Vietnam, where your brother, father, sonor youfaced deadly combat.Weiglwas an 18-year old Ohio soldier who saw and participated in unshakable human damage. He became, afterward, the preeminent poet of the experience Americans have tried for decades to dodge. From the start, his poetrys love of country, and outrage at our failed national morality, echoed Whitman and Melville; the shock and despair those giants turned into art, their pleas for the future.Apostle of DesireisBruceWeigls chronicle of how one veteran has carried on a singular postwar dtente, including intense and multiple returns to Vietnam and years spent engaging its culture, life, citizens, shrines, dreams, and especially poets, translating and publishing them in the US, marrying the two languages as redemption. His stories of how it felt to come home a pariah and a hero, depending on who was talking, compose a hard misery that has not yet ended, but his mature poetry becomes a celebration of Vietnams rivers, mists, flowers, hand-holding lovers, children, and abundant and joyful human-ness.Weigls poems aremake no mistaketough, unflinching, and demanding in his quest for self-reclamation. Thats what our country trained him to be. But what most stands out inApostle of Desireis a kind of holiness like the songs of monks, and that barbed, witty, lonesome knowledge only deeply examined experience provides. Whitmans. Melvilles. I thinkApostle of Desireis what poet James Wright meant when he said he wanted to write the poetry of a grown man. This complex, serious book is about American conduct. It is grown-up and splendid.Dave Smith

Author Bio

BruceWeigl is theauthor of over twenty books of poetry, translations and essays, most recently Among Elms, in Ambush (BOA, 2021), On the Shores of Welcome Home (BOA,2019), and The Abundance of Nothing (NorthwesternUniversity Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize inPoetry. He is the translator of Nguyen Phan Que Mai's The Secret of Hoa Sen (BOA, 2014). His poetry, essays, articles,reviews and translations have appeared in TheNation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, and Harpers, among a wide variety ofmagazines and journals. His poetry has been translated internationally intoRomanian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Bulgarian, Japanese, Korean andSerbian.