early readings - Charlie Bondhus - contested terrain

'Few books capture absence and dislocation as well as Contested Terrain does. Here, a detached boy comes of age in the rural south amidst “the brick edges of a world /eerily absent of lyric”; a deployed soldier showers late at night, “imagin[ing] the hand /running across his scalp to be his wife’s”; and recruits train by shooting at “anonymous /black shapes with no neck.” Indeed, the youth/soldier/veteran who speaks in many of these poems wrestles with these spectral shapes throughout his life, frequently observing, seldom engaging. There are moments of relief—beautiful ones, in which “the beastly /sounds begin to vanish /[and] the moon and stars almost touch our skin”—yet DA Gray never loses sight of the working-class soldier’s struggle with an ambivalent culture. In this era of endless war and unexamined patriotism, Contested Terrain is a necessary book.'
 
-- Charlie Bondhus is an award-winning poet whose work is featured in four books, including What We Have Learned to Love, How the Boy Might See It, and Monsters and Victims.  His most recent book, All The Heat We Could Carry  earned the 2013 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and the 2014 Thom Gunn Award.  Bondhus is the poetry editor at The Good Men Project and teaches literature and writing at Raritan Valley Community College.