Editorial Reviews

HERE'S WHAT OTHERS HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT THE BOOK!
"Brown has a good ear for military life, especially for what is significant and how it is conveyed, sometimes in subtle ways."–Tom Ricks, Foreign Policy magazine's "The Best Defense" blog (Full review here.)
"Sherpa does a great job blending the world of combat with the civilian world back home. He's good at contrasting the foreign with the familiar. [...] The poems range from the outright humorous to the dark."–Eric "Shmo" Chandler, the "Shmotown" blog (Full review here.)
"Unlike in previous wars, the best telling of the soldiers' stories has come from the soldiers themselves, and not from traditional journalists. Many of these books add to our understanding of people at war, while a few are just macho battle stories. Some seek to reach into a war's soul. 'Welcome to FOB Haiku' [...] is one from the latter category."–Peter Van Buren, author of "We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People" (Full review here.)
"An important collection for anyone who wants to know the warrior's story in ways the TV newscaster and the politician cannot show."–D.A. Gray, author of the 2011 war poetry collection "Overwatch."
"The Iowans I knew were congenial, but also quiet and serious, guarded I felt about their emotions and true thoughts, their humor manifesting itself in acerbic wit aimed at absurdity of circumstance. No Iowa soldiers I knew were poets, but now Brown's new volume of verse [...] puts the Midwestern blend of earnestness and cleverness I saw in Afghanistan to work on behalf of poetry about service, deployment, and war."–Peter Molin, the "Time Now" military literature blog (Full review here.) 
"There’s one poem [...] that has moved me ever since I first read it [...] 'Static' is about a Navy Corpsman (medic) trying to communicate with his very young son, apparently from the distance of deployment. Every time I read this effing poem, I tear up. [...] Its simplicity belies a whole world of loss, patience, waiting, love. The whole world of a small child distilled through a parent’s hopeful questions."–Andria Williams, author of the 2015 novel "The Longest Night", at "The Military Spouse Book Review" blog. (Full review here.)
"Randy Brown has written some of the best poetry that I know of to come out of our war in Afghanistan. [...] My bet is that as many as half a dozen of his poems in Welcome to FOB Haiku will be widely read and remembered for a long time, after most other contemporary war poems have been forgotten. Maybe one will eventually become the go-to poem for anthologies and school curricula about Afghanistan."–Stephen Sossaman, "Poets and War" blog. (Read full review here.)

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