Take It from a Soldier: On Kevin Powers’s “Yellow Birds”

At The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nathan Deuel reviews Kevin Powers’s critically-acclaimed war novel, The Yellow Birds. “War sucks. We all agree,” writes Deuel. But those who don’t fight remain at a distance from the horror of war. “[W]e rely on literary writers to go beyond the news reports and political grandstanding to take us deeper, to let us see and feel the horror,” Deuel continues. “Former Army machine-gunner Powers, who fought and maybe killed, and also studied poetry, shows from his opening line—’The war tried to kill us in the spring’—that he intends to wrestle not only with the big stuff, but to bring us into the ring.”

Read at Los Angeles Review of Books

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