Poster - Authors at the Armoury Series featuring Benjamin Hertwig. It was a poetry reading and a book signing event for his latest work "Slow War". SLOW WAR (2017, MCGILL-QUEEN'S) Benjamin Hertwig’s debut collection of poetry, Slow War, is at once an account of contemporary warfare and a personal journey of loss and the search for healing. It stands in the tradition of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Kevin Powers’s “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.” A century after the First World War, Hertwig presents both the personal cost of war in poems such as “Somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan” and “Food Habits of Coyotes, as Determined by Examination of Stomach Contents,” and the potential for healing in unlikely places in “A Poem Is Not Guantánamo Bay.” This collection provides no easy answers – Hertwig looks at the war in Afghanistan with the unflinching gaze of a soldier and the sustained attention of a poet. In his accounting of warfare and its difficult aftermath on the homefront, the personal becomes political. While these poems inhabit both experimental and traditional forms, the breakdown of language channels a descent into violence and an ascent into a future that no longer feels certain, where history and trauma are forever intertwined. Hertwig reminds us that remembering war is a political act and that writing about war is a way we remember. Benjamin Hertwig is a Canadian poet, whose debut poetry collection Slow War was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry at the 2017 Governor General's Awards. A former member of the Canadian Armed Forces who served in Afghanistan, he has also published short fiction and non-fiction work in Maisonneuve, Canadian Literature, The Walrus, Ricepaper, Geez, Prairie Fire, Pleiades and The New York Times. He won a National Magazine Award in the Personal Journalism category in 2017 for "The Burn". From the Toronto Star: War by Benjamin HertwigMcGill-Queen’s University Press, 126 pages, $16.95 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was once called “soldier’s heart.” The term may not be scientifically precise, but it’s metaphorically apt. Benjamin Hertwig served in the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan, and this hard-hitting debut collection is the record of a soldier’s heart, before, during and after war. The “before” poems have an elegiac sense of distance, while the combat poems have a jarring immediacy: the lines stutter and break into fragments. In “First Shot,” Hertwig writes of the confusing surge of emotion when he shoots at the driver of a taxi following their convoy too closely: “you’ve never felt this way before shame euphoria, the first/time you saw a body without clothes, your order was to shoot.” Poems about returning to civilian life bear poignant witness to how war has changed him: “When you returned from the war, you didn’t/think of the dead much. you wanted to be/a child again.”