Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. His memoir My Life as a Foreign Country was published in 2014. He’s the editor of The Kiss, and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, and other fine journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando with Dene, the world's sweetest golden retriever.

“Here, Bullet is a book of poems about the war in Iraq, written by a veteran whose eye for the telling detail is as strategic as it is poetic.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Several hundred books have now been published on the Iraq War…but none have felt necessary until now. There’s something in the lumbering of prose that cannot capture what poetry, done right, can make immanent with its insistent beat—as the power of the cadences soldiers sing cannot truly be understood apart from the accompanying beat of boots beneath them. With Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet, we have the first war poetry since Yusef Komunyaaka’s Dien Cai Dau that matters.”
—Rain Taxi

“As a war poet, [Brian Turner] sidesteps the classic distinction between romance and irony, opting instead for the surreal.”
—The New Yorker

“Turner attempts to capture the extreme experience of war by depicting the feelings it generates: the sense of loss, hatred, humiliation, love, uncertainty, and dreamy longing for a normal life…”
—Library Journal

“The poems on the pages of Here, Bullet, with their immediacy of impact, their universality of theme, their blend of cultural and historical insight, and their many tiered reverberations of the aftermath of gut wrenching violence, make for a powerful reading experience….The relationship Turner establishes with the reader is not dialogue but a tidal insistence on reflection, that if there is meaning in loss, there must be meaning in what precedes loss, in what is related to loss. There is no harm in such reflection, argues Here, Bullet, but, rather harm stems from the lack of it.”
—The Franklin Journal

“Here, Bullet is a poignant and brutally lucid evocation of war and the terror of human contingency…”
—Military Review

“Turner’s work adds vividly to the sad record [of war literature]. I recommend a slow and careful reading. Be prepared for some pain.”
—Wolf Moon Press Journal

“These poems are dispatches from a war we largely know through statistics and stage-managed press conferences and the words of correspondents holed up in hotels. And yet by invading this country, by sending our army to fight there, we have linked ourselves to its sand, its fire, its oil, its pride. ‘This land of confluence and heat,’ Turner writes, will become the nation of soldiers who die there, ‘and even if they live, it will be theirs as well—the land that tested their souls and changed them.'”
—Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages

“[Brian Turner’s] work is straightforward and direct. It highlights the violence and death of the war in a manner little seen elsewhere.” —Publishers Weekly “Brian Turner’s poems are indispensable not only for their craft and their penetrating lyric power, but for the circumstances under which they were written. No book of poetry since Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau brings us as close to the realities of combat as this, but the realities are uniquely Iraq’s. Reader, take note: 21st century poetry, as such, may well begin here.”
—T. R. Hummer

“Brian Turner writes as only a soldier can, of terror and compassion, hurt and horror, sympathy and desire. He takes us into the truth and trauma of the Iraq war in language that is precise, delicate and beautiful, even as it tells of a suicide bomber, a skull shattered by a bullet, a blade in a bloodgroove.”
—Andrew Himes, editor of Voices in Wartime Anthology

“Soldiers have long been the custodians of the real war inside the war of the politicians. Unfortunately, most of the voices get lost when they come home. Not so with Iraq war veteran Brian Turner, with his uncommon eloquence, and his sensitivity to the land in which the war is being fought. His poems reveal his own internal landscape, and they celebrate the other—even as they deplore the violence.”
—Doug Anderson

“It could be the best war literature of any medium published since 9/11; it’s certainly the best book I’ve read so far. I’ve spent the last couple weeks explaining why war memoirs don’t make for great literature, and it’s draining to be so negative, so often. It’s a relief to come out and say I love something. Every semi-literate person interested in the Iraq war needs to read this book, ingest it, remember it, and share it with others.”
—Eric Cummings, blogger at On Violence