"In Phantom Noise, the speaker recognizes the degree to which language is a co-creative of reality...and as such, these poems begin to interrogate the speaker's entanglement in acts that he had heretofore largely only recorded."--The American Poetry Review

"[Turner's] writing is crisp, reportorial, earnest... [He] challenges us to experience war at its worst and confront its human costs without ideology or nationalism."--The Georgia Review

"In many ways, this is not a collection for the faint-hearted, dealing as it does with deaths and mutilations. However, its scope is broader than that, as it also skillfully looks at history, culture, love, and family."--The North

"[Turner's] is a poetry of horror, but also one of love and loss, infused with the restless spirits of the dead who hover over the living on both sides...His is a voice of honesty and despair, of imperfection and a self-awareness that most of us can only pretend to possess."--Connotation Press: An Online Artifact

"Turner's book of poems is something that transcends poetry..."--New Pages

"Turner's second book, Phantom Noise, continues to bear witness...looking on with equal parts courage and concern, but also as a poet whose language is always drawing comparisons, shifting the picture to encompass not just one tragedy, but a world's worth..."--Salamander

"Turner's resilient, humane poems remind us of war's impact but also provoke and question."--The Guardian

"It's hard to think of a better way around ideology than poetry like this. Turner shows us soldiers who are invincible and wounded, a nation noble and culpable, and a war by turns necessary and abominable. He brings us closer to our own phantom guilt and speaks the words that we both do and do not want to hear."--The Washington Post

"...we need [Turner's] bracing "bullet-borne language" as he tries to reconcile the chaos of Iraq with the demands of the poetic line."--The New York Times

AUTHOR

Brian Turner

Here, Bullet

The Next Level: An anthology of high school grads who dare to succeed

What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump

Phantom Noise

Just This: Poems

My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir