War at Home

Overview

A child trapped in a house of pandemonium where all the phones are fish. Brothers playing war games against an enigmatic foe. The modern-day son of Odysseus hiding in a cloud of blunt smoke in the garage while predators lurk within and without. In his debut collection, Christopher Brunt deploys a restlessly inventive array of forms and voices, from the philosophical to the feverishly surreal, giving us artists who overdose on their own desire, prophets who sing the kingdom’s collapse from strip club booths and from behind the bars of death row. Profane, ecstatic, vulnerable, and fluent in as many literary registers as there are angles in a mirrored room, WAR AT HOME is autobiography written in myth.

Author Biography

Christopher Brunt’s poetry, fiction, and essays have been featured in Ploughshares, The Nation, Oxford American, Fugue, Meridian, Copper Nickel, the Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. He has been a finalist for the Alma Book Award, the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, and the St. Lawrence Book Award, and shortlisted for the Christopher Smart Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, he has an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at Syracuse University.