Apostle of Desire - by Bruce Weigl

About the Book

"Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of America's most revered military veteran writers, Bruce Weigl brings readers face-to-face with our country's legacy of violence, the suffering of combat PTSD, and what it means to be truly haunted. Taking its cue from James Wright's goal to write, "the poetry of a grown man," the poems in Apostle of Desire juxtapose the peace and comfort offered by the natural world with the bruising intensity of manmade violence. These sudden tonal shifts express a vulnerability and extremity of feeling that strips audiences' own emotions bare, leading readers to question their roles as bystanders and consumers of violent media. In sharing his intertwining feelings of love and shame for both country and self, Weigl places readers into the role of the watcher and opens a window into the traumas of the Vietnam War and life's daily battles with PTSD. The honesty of Weigl's poetry exposes the ghosts of pain while still witnessing the glories of love, nature, and his ongoing experiences with the rich daily life of contemporary Vietnam. Readers will face the solitude of regret and the hopeful pursuit of redemption--remembering the past and looking toward the future"--

Book Synopsis

Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of America's most revered military veteran writers -Bruce Weigl brings readers face-to-face with our country's legacy of violence, the suffering of combat PTSD, and what it means to be truly haunted.

Taking its cue from James Wright's goal to write "the poetry of a grown man," the poems in Apostle of Desire juxtapose the peace and comfort offered by the natural world with the bruising intensity of manmade violence. These sudden tonal shifts express a vulnerability and extremity of feeling that strips audiences' own emotions bare, leading readers to question their roles as bystanders and consumers of violent media.

In sharing his intertwining feelings of love and shame for both country and self, Weigl places readers into the role of the watcher and opens a window into the traumas of the Vietnam War and life's daily battles with PTSD. The honesty of Weigl's poetry exposes the ghosts of pain while still witnessing the glories of love, nature, and his ongoing experiences with the rich daily life of contemporary Vietnam.

Readers will face the solitude of regret and the hopeful pursuit of redemption--remembering the past and looking toward the future.

Review Quotes

"Bruce Weigl's 15th collection of
poetry, Apostle of Desire, reminds me what people were feeling in
1968, blood in our streets and in the streets of Vietnam, where your brother,
father, son-or you--faced deadly combat. Weigl was an 18-year old Ohio
soldier who saw and participated in unshakable human damage. He became,
afterward, the preeminent poet of the experience Americans have tried for
decades to dodge. From the start, his poetry's love of country, and outrage at
our failed national morality, echoed Whitman and Melville; the shock and
despair those giants turned into art, their pleas for the future. Apostle
of Desire is Bruce Weigl's chronicle of how one veteran has
carried on a singular postwar déeacute;tente, including intense and multiple returns
to Vietnam and years spent engaging its culture, life, citizens, shrines,
dreams, and especially poets, translating and publishing them in the US,
marrying the two languages as redemption. His stories of how it felt to come
home a pariah and a hero, depending on who was talking, compose a hard misery
that has not yet ended, but his mature poetry becomes a celebration of
Vietnam's rivers, mists, flowers, hand-holding lovers, children, and abundant
and joyful human-ness. Weigl's poems are--make no mistake--tough,
unflinching, and demanding in his quest for self-reclamation. That's what our
country trained him to be. But what most stands out in Apostle of
Desire is a kind of holiness like the songs of monks, and that
barbed, witty, lonesome knowledge only deeply examined experience provides.
Whitman's. Melville's. I think Apostle of Desire is what
poet James Wright meant when he said he wanted to write the poetry of a grown
man. This complex, serious book is about American conduct. It is grown-up and
splendid."--Dave Smith

About the Author

Bruce
Weigl is the
author of over twenty books of poetry, translations and essays, most recently Among Elms, in Ambush (BOA, 2021). The Abundance of Nothing (Northwestern
University Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in
Poetry. His work has appeared in The
Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, and Harpers, among a wide variety of
magazines and journals. Weigl lives in Oberlin, Ohio.