War Poet

Rob Jacques’s War Poet is a striking, memorable book, full of erotic and martial intensity. The poems create a lyrical memoir out of the poet’s time serving in the United States military as a gay man. Ultimately, Jacques recognizes the self as a primary center of conflict. The body—even his own, precious and expendable—is charged with finding war in love and love in war. Like the military conflicts at the heart of this collection, these poems teeter between formal rigidity and wild abandon, as the poet explores complex intersections between sexuality and violence: “we treat flesh savagely / in battle or in bed.” Depicting tender relations between soldiers at rest and on the front lines and turbulent love affairs, this book takes on elements of language and form itself as its fiercest weaponry. - Richie Hofmann, author of Second Empire