World War One was documented in poetry by young men at the front who were survived by their poetry; what they experienced spoke about their experiences for them and the likes of Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen were immortalized under the collective umbrella of "the war poets."
Brian Turner is a modern-day War poet whose time in Iraq is also immortalized in his poetry. He is brutal in his description of events but also neutral in his description so that the reader is able to draw their own conclusions about his experiences and the experiences of his fellow soldiers in Iraq.
Turner served in the U.S. Army for seven years and starting in November 2003 was an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. He manages to portray the beauty of the scenery he found in the mountains of Iraq with the evil and ugliness of the terrors going on around them. Here, Bullet is his first volume of poetry and was awarded many honors and prizes; the most prestigious of these was the Beatrice Hawley Award in 2005. His second volume of poetry was a winner of the T.S. Eliot Award. His writing was also the basis of a large-scale musical composition called Dreams of the Fallen first performed at the Nationals World War Two museum in New Orleans.
