About Hugh Martin, from Goodreads:

"Hugh Martin is originally from northeast Ohio and he spent six years in the Army National Guard and eleven months in Iraq. His chapbook, So, How Was The War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center and his full-length collection, The Stick Soldiers, will be available through BOA Editions in March 2013. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the winner of the 11th annual A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions, Ltd., and the winner of the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award from The Iowa Review. Currently he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California."


Reviews from back cover:

"Hugh Martin's poems navigate the psychological terrain of war and its aftereffects. They offer insights into the soldier's journey--filled with visions of sand storms and beheadings and hashish, ziplock bags full of Lifesavers given to Iraqi children. These poems also study the war that veterans carry home--to the surreal landscape of the Atlanta airport, pawn shops and liquor stores and Sharky's Gentlemen's Club, the bedrooms in the suburbs of America. Martin's poems stand as a reminder that within the anonymity of the uniform there lives a human being.--Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet

Hugh Martin's poems are a deceptively cool jazz structure of survival by observation, and they reach us, or rather reach into us: they come in through doors that human beings keep leaving open but which we wish they would close. Intimate and public both, Martin's are the beginnings of the next generation of poems that carry difficult news in them, poems born from the now new-century wars. Simply calling these efforts war poems is a mistake, in that they push beyond war and rise to the level of human connection, as the best war poems so often do. There is substance here, even and especially when it tells us that war--horrible as it often is, and boring as it mostly is--has not yet found the tools to teach us. Or else, we do not have the tools to listen. One speaker, in fact, has to remind himself, "this is real. This is real." As these poems demonstrate, we would do well to remind ourselves as well.--Alberto Rios

"These precise, plain-spoken poems are limned by a subtle music, not to mention a lyric grace that is never overplayed. For in a world as harsh as this one, a world delimited by war, beauty is as appalling as it is necessary. Hugh Martin's great achievement is to remind us of this necessity, and to assert the power of poetry as witness and as solace." --James Harms