“Brunt has given us something singular, indelible, lasting”
— Kaveh Akbar

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“In WAR AT HOME, Christopher Brunt has delivered a fine debut.”
— Afaa Weaver

A child trapped in a house of pandemonium where all the phones are fish. Brothers playing war games against an enigmatic foe. The modern-day son of Odysseus hiding in a cloud of blunt smoke in the garage while predators lurk within and without. In his debut collection, Christopher Brunt deploys a restlessly inventive array of forms and voices, from the philosophical to the feverishly surreal, giving us artists who overdose on their own desire, prophets who sing the kingdom's collapse from strip club booths and from behind the bars of death row. These poems are allegories and fables of selves in crisis, and in the desperate throes of transformation. In flashes of lucid narrative or high-wire lyric inquiry, they seek to clarify the most urgent of personal truths out of the chaos and overflow of memory, out of secrecy and shame, out of wonder and mourning. More than an exploration of masculinity, power and authority, whiskey, guns, and dread, the addicts, religious criminals, soul-poisoned lovers, deviant saints, and lost brothers in this book forge their transformations via rhetorics of self-scrutiny-in the excavation of memory, they glimpse justice, are sometimes even visited by grace. Alcoholics wade shivering into the sure current of recovery. The dead witness the living in all their bewildering freedom and grief. Voices shed their bodies and wander the city at night, delivering sermons on being and time, asking inappropriate questions. New fathers watch their babies sleep or learn to walk, and hear the orphic languages of mothers, two, or seven, or a multitude issuing from the dimensions of eternity, pitying the whole world its cruelty. Profane, ecstatic, vulnerable, and fluent in as many literary registers as there are angles in a mirrored room, WAR AT HOME is autobiography written in myth.

Praise for WAR AT HOME

A favorite poem in Christopher Brunt’s WAR AT HOME shows us a father watching his son learn to feed himself, watching the child smear beans through his hair as suddenly, the news on a phone alerts our speaker to a historic famine elsewhere in the world (“like ships crashing like the sea in flames”). If the concussive simultaneity of such moments exemplifies our modern condition, then the modern condition is one of constant whiplash and vertigo, a kind of perpetual inebriation. “I am a sick and splendid animal,” one poem declares. In another, “Every baby who was ever born was born immortal. / The dying is done by us.” There’s a confidence here, a spiritual maturity I associate with the very highest lyric—Brunt has given us something singular, indelible, lasting. 

·      Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! and Pilgrim Bell

 

The voice that exposes the unspeakable is a brave and fragile song that sings itself despite the terror. These poems accomplish the hard task of witnessing the unspeakable, and they do it with a fine precision, a deft turning in places the world all too often wants to deny. When a little boy grows, and can take time to let the light inside the terror speak to him, we get work like this, where the poet lays bare the possibilities of hope, including being able to throw away the dangerous things that pretend to take away our pain. In WAR AT HOME, Christopher Brunt has delivered a fine debut.

·      Afaa M. Weaver, author of A Fire in the Hills, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets

 

The sleeper hit poetry book of the season comes from Christopher Brunt, whose astonishing debut shows such feats of psychological wizardry and pyrotechnic skill I read it through three times straight. Reader, I wept and laughed out loud. Buy this dang book! You’re welcome—

·      Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liars’ Club

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