Just Like a Soldier: A Memoir
Write up by the author Robert Stark
Excerpt
“I have no background as a farmer. In fact, the largest garden I ever kept was a small community garden plot at my college campus in Olympia, Washington where I grew food to donate to the local food pantry for college credit. I was raised in houses with small yards, apartments, and barracks. The only landscaping I ever did was mow lawns and rake leaves. My first step-father, Dan Silver, loved to come out of his office after I was finished only to rake the leaves and cut the grass I had somehow missed. I never did things right.
Shortly after parachuting into Iraq in March of 2003, I was riding in the back of a Humvee chasing a man carrying an AK-47 through a farmer’s field. We could not find the gunman, so we returned to the farmer’s mud hut to provide his kids with small American flags and toothbrushes in exchange for driving over his crops in a four vehicle convoy. The simplicity of the farmer’s lifestyle, the look of hard work and determination on his face and body, the kids playing outside in the sand without plastic toys, and the way he leaned on his hoe with a look of resilience made me feel in awe of him. I wanted a similar version of his life back home in Alaska. Of course, I had no idea how his life really was—it was merely a teenage hopefulness that enveloped me mixed with an escape from the harsh realities of how my actions were actually impacting his people and country. I was unable to comprehend or imagine the challenges of being a father raising a family and a farm in an arid, war zone. The kids accepted our gifts and waved goodbye. The farmer and his wife did not wave. I respected him for that.”
Book description
Bob Stark wanted to be a farmer. The seed was planted while chasing a man with a gun through a farmer’s field in Iraq. Nine years later, he and his brother bought property in rural Alaska to start the arduous work of turning a forest into a field. After their agreement falls through, Bob is left to work the land alone. With struggles piling high and no resolutions in sight, he withdraws every dollar he has to embark on a motorcycle journey to either save himself or destroy himself.
Just Like a Soldier is a memoir about accepting the past, building a better future, and appreciating the present. A story of grit, forgiveness, and hope. Campfires, fresh apples, and strengthening family ties.
Order Just Like a Soldier from Robert Stark’s online store, SecretGardenAlaska.org, or from your favorite independent bookstore, or online book dealer. Follow his family’s off-grid farm life by reading their weekly blog posts at SecretGardenAlaska.org/
What Turtle Blood Tastes Like
Write up by the author Jonas Lamb
Excerpt from “Keeping Control” (line formatting in this blog may alter the poet’s line breaks)
Son, our human bodies are time-bombs. All around us, family, friends—detonating
even if our own body-bombs have years left on the clock,
we are full of destructive potential and shrapnel. Hope
in God has been scientifically proven to be less effective than a placebo
in the control group. Even less effective against shrapnel, though I keep this from you.
No one is in control. I appreciate your belief in me as your father, but believe me
when I tell you my control over you is tenuous. I am in complete control, complete control
of very little other than the dog or cat and really, I rarely have any control of them or myself
for that matter. After all, who wants to be in control? Control is a cage
for responsibility, though I keep this from you. Some days I hear my own time-bomb
ticking furiously…
Synopsis
In What Turtle Blood Tastes Like, Lamb sifts through the dirt, hungry for roots, for memory, for the bones of ancestors. Regret, doubt and anxiety are connective tissue, linking childhood to fatherhood and house to body. The debut collection interrogates what is inherited and what can be cultivated through postmemory. Turtle blood tastes like mud and skunk cabbage, is bitter like iron and fear. These poems taste like summers used to smell, musky, dirty, perfect.
Reviews
“…Lamb resists the urge to simplify fatherhood, landscape, or ancestry. Many of these poems start out warm and firelit, only to expose the damp and peaty world beneath.” –Erin Coughlin Hollowell, author of Corvus and Crater and Every Atom
“In this tender collection, Jonas Lamb draws us a map — of fatherhood and family, of the natural world and the human-made one, of region and nation — and then proceeds to explore the far edges of that map. Most of our lives happen there, in the unanticipated spaces beyond borders, the places where we have no guide to lead us…” –Amorak Huey, author of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy
What Turtle Blood Tastes Like from Finishing Line Press will will be released on September 12.
Get your copy now from Finishing Line Press ($22.99) or the author’s website.
Jonas Lamb lives in Juneau, Alaska with his wife and sons. When not practicing the parenting arts, waiting for winter, drinking in the laundry room or investing sweat and blood equity into his south-facing, storm-blasted, 110-year-old house he works as a librarian and at being a better middle-aged human. His poems have appeared in Tidal Echoes, The Kent Collector, Juneau’s Poetry OmniBus among others. What Turtle Blood Tastes Like is his debut collection and the recipient of the Jason Wenger Award for Literary Excellence.