Poems by Dan O'Brian based on his connections with the War Photograhter Paul Watson.
"Paul Watson won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu; he has since reported from the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria ... Deriving from correspondence between poet and war reporter and their eventual meeting on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, and from transcripts and Watson’s own memoir, these poems bear unsparing witness to the incalculable damage inflicted by contemporary warfare. "

‘In this gut-wrenching, hardboiled collection, poet and playwright O’Brien focuses on Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist and war correspondent Paul Watson, a witness to atrocities and violence in Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia ... The language of the poems – most of which are persona poems written in the myriad of voices that Watson has encountered in his travels – is spare, adopting a journalistic tone seemingly as a means to cope with what is witnessed. In this context, war is the hell through which Watson, a kind of Virgil figure, leads the poet. “I see / it like a labyrinth,” the photographer tells the poet, “If you get the truth/ you get out. But you don’t, it just gets worse / you get more lost.” One gets the sense that Watson has been scarred not only by what he has seen, but by his own paradoxical role as a journalist who effectively profits from scenes of bedlam and horror, and who is both attracted to and repelled by them. “This is what / I've turned into,” Watson tells O’Brien in the final poem, “a mercenary and/ a desperate one at that.”
– Publishers Weekly