In conjunction with the national touring humanities exhibit, "Always Lost: A Meditation on War," on display through October 24 in the Carleton College Weitz Center for Creativity, renowned war poet Brian Turner will appear on Tuesday, Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the Weitz Center Room 236. The recipient of numerous literary honors, Turner's poetry appears in the award-winning volumes "Here, Bullet" (2005) and "Phantom Noise" (2010), and his memoir "My Life as a Foreign Country" (2014) has just been published by W.W. Norton. His work has been featured on National Public Radio, The New York Times and in The New Yorker.
Turner is the winner of the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA “Best in the West” award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among other honors. "My Life as a Foreign Country" paints a devastating portrait of what it means to be a soldier and a human being. Turner served seven years in the U.S. Army, including one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division.
Benjamin Busch calls the memoir a “brilliant fever dream of war’s surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence,” he says, ”has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life."
The poet who wrote "The Hurt Locker," Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and now directs the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.
The heart of the exhibit “Always Lost: A Meditation on War” is the Wall of the Dead: individual photographs with names of the more than 6,500 U.S. military war casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001. The exhibition has evolved into a powerful meditation on the effect of war on each of us. It has become a sacred space in which to contemplate the personal costs and collective sacrifice of these particular conflicts, and consequently, of all wars. In the meantime, casualties continue to mount, and the Wall of the Dead continues to grow.
"The mission of 'Always Lost' is to bring the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts home," explains Carleton professor of history Susannah Ottaway. "To personalize each American military war death so that we, as individuals and as a nation, contemplate the personal costs and collective sacrifices not only of these particular conflicts, but of all wars."
Ottaway notes, "This year, as we commemorate 100 years since the beginning of World War I, and look around the world at the pervasive horrors of conflict in Syria, Ukraine, and many other regions, it is especially timely for us to pause to reflect on war's impact."
More about the exhibit can be found online at www.wnc.edu/always_lost/.
“Always Lost: A Meditation on War” is on loan to the Minnesota Humanities Center from Western Nevada College and is sponsored by the Carleton College Humanities Center and Arts@Carleton. For more information, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4389.
