Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry

What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in Service is truth-complex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossible-about the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition that comes with returning home to find the war reduced to background noise for a remote civilian population. Bruce Lack's forceful, authentic poetry confronts the human cost of sending young men and women to fight a war of questionable justification against an insurgency unbound by rules of engagement. Lack's poems engage honestly with the frustration of fighting an elusive, ruthless enemy, the guilt of surviving when others do not, and the residual anger that may never leave the generation of veterans of the War on Terror. Written in the voice of the Marine but directed toward and accessible to the civilian, Service is a book that seeks to close the communication gap between the two.

The Lyme Letters is epistolary verse that spells out a memoir. R, a non-binary femme character, narrates their experience of disease and recovery through recurrent letters to doctors, pets, family members, lovers, and a "Master." R, in letter form and repurposed religious texts, also explores the paradoxical experiences of queer non-reproductivity, chronic illness and disability, and the healing that can be found in the liminal spaces between.

Prospect comprises poems about vantage points, country and personhood, and the difficulty of understanding what is true. Through meticulously articulated explorations of knowledge, truth, language, and science's explanatory power, Prospect propels us toward grasping even the metaphysical. Presented in four parts-Prospect, Country, Proof, and Studies on Anatomy and Mourning-Prospect offers a vision of life scaled as small as a cell and as large as a country, as bordered and un-bordered as a human body, and heightened by the tensions of all that cannot be known.