War often provides veterans with stories to tell. Often times, these stories can be about their friends in battle, or the places they’ve seen. However, among the stories of friendship and service, there may be a few disturbing memories that are accounts of the dark reality of war. Although most people who have never served in the military may never know what war really looks like, veterans and active soldiers can be haunted by those memories. Brian Turner, a veteran of the Iraq War, is the author of a rare account of the brutality of war as well as the mental trauma that is produced from it.

Phantom Noise is not Turner’s first book. In 2005, his book Here, Bullet provided a view of the Iraq war not seen previously. Phantom Noise is an additional document of the war that Brian Turner lived through, but the book’s narrator is not like he once was in Here, Bullet. He is more tired and nostalgic, often writing about memories of his childhood, of a time before he went to war. The poem “At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center” reflects a soldier who has returned home, but has not completely left the warzone that he lived in for so long --- “I bust a 50 pound box of double-headed nails / open by accident, their oily bright shanks and / and diamond points like firing pins / from M-4s and M-16s.”

Turner’s poems carry a feeling of exhaustion with them, as if the author’s traumatic feelings seep through the very page the reader is holding. For example, a profound feeling of chaos can be delivered in the book’s title poem --- “There is this ringing hum this / bullet-borne language ringing / shell-fall and static.” While almost all of the poems in the book use drawn-out and detailed lines, the book itself exhibits poems of traumatic memories, war injuries, and longing for a lover back home.

Brian Turner’s account of the Iraq War, with its gritty and emotional lines, serves as a testament for all those killed, and definitely warrants a read-through.

Review by Nick Caputo from Augustana College, IL