The war wears through, always, eventually. The instinct to disguise oneself as human, day in and day out, after such utter de-humanization, is obscene. The war continues to kill well beyond any theater of combat. Still Looking for Neuzil is a longitudinal reckoning with the fifty years since Fredson’s service in the Vietnam-American War.

If war poetry, or, more specifically, the poetry of soldiering, has focused on experiences within war-its moments of no return, of being at peak intensity or in the contrasting troughs of waiting, of intgrospection-then Fredson’s poems aim at something else: the life sentence of veteran-ship. This book is a gift to all soldiers who live in the dissonance between war and civilian life, as well as the psychotherapists who work with them. He doesn’t speak about his PTSD he speaks from it. He takes us into the horrors of the Vietnam War and its lifelong psychological cost to him through a direct and deeply personal exploration of war trauma. Mike offers us a powerful voice that at once becomes poetry as therapy. This is a book about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness.” I consider the terse, obsessive quality of this book, and, though it is not fashionable to quote Arthur Rimbaud, I will: Fredson’s book fulfills Rimbaud’s exhortation that a visionary must sustain “a long, boundless, systematized disorganization of the senses. Still Looking for Neuzil should receive the fanfare of a book like Catch 22 if “Americans in the 21 st Century still have the capacity to feel. The veteran de-creates the world and the self in an attempt, however desperate, to make peace with “Being Back in the World.” In Fredson’s poems this hopeful and disheartening mantra burns far into the 21 st Century. Time is against the speaker because he is against himself as movingly as the speakers in the best dark Coleridge poems. I love the fluidity of memory and identity in Still Looking for Neuzil because both are pungent with terror and love.

Beast-man by Michael Fredson