Graham Barnhart

Graham Barnhart served in several overseas campaigns as a Special Operations medic. His work with soldiers, trauma victims, and other medical personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan undergirds much of his poetry. With artistry and grace, insight and compassion, Barnhart examines the many violences associated with armed conflict–physical and environmental, of course, but also social and psychological. His startling debut collection of poems, The War Makes Everyone Lonely, has been praised for its spine-chilling explorations of military aggression, its subtle representations of soldierly bonds, and its hope that language–artful language–might somehow shape a future where war occupies a far less central place in global affairs. The book has been called a “searing field report” and a search “for words to describe realities that may have no words, yet require them.” Barnhart joins a host of important American writers who have grappled with the horrors of war, from two of our greatest poets–Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson–to novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, and Julia Alvarez.