New Life - Softcover

These are powerful and original poems. I don t know anything like them. They are terrifying and beautiful. Sometimes terrifyingly beautiful. Don t leave this book on a doily in your parlor. Instead, nail it to the door of every church, mosque, temple, and government office in the world. This is the poetry of courage.
Thomas Lux

With a reporter s zeal, in poems marked by crisp speech and a piercing, melancholy humor, O Brien reminds us that the facts of war, suicide, illness, family, and much else remain largely unintelligible until they are redeemed for us by poetry s living truth.
--David Yezzi

Forgive me, just understand
I don t want to do this. No. We have to
do this. Yes. We have to do this until
we don t.

War Reporter (2013) described in the Guardian as a masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling, and a completely sui generis addition not just to writing about war but to contemporary poetry was the fruit of a bond between the poet Dan O Brien and the war correspondent Paul Watson that demanded of each an extreme degree of self-exposure.

In New Life the scope of that bond is both deepened and broadened, taking in not just the Arab Spring and its aftermath in Syria, Libya and Egypt but Afghans on the tourist trail in Canada, meetings with Hollywood producers, and changes in the personal lives of the war reporter and poet. Nothing is off-limits. This is a way of writing unique in contemporary literature.