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Thursday, December 12, 2019

C'ÊST COLLATERAL DOMMAGE

by Myron Pulier


“So ‘the book of collateral damage’ is this project that the bookseller in Baghdad is working on, but it's almost an impossible project because he wants to document, minute-by-minute, everything that gets destroyed [in the 2003 bombing of Iraq by the United States]. And the objects themselves tell their story, but he never gets beyond the first minute. ... The narrator tells him this requires an institution, and the bookseller tells him there are no institutions anymore, and I'm alone ... it might sound like an insane project, but someone has to do it.” —Sinan Antoon, author of The Book of Collateral Damage, a novel due out in paperback in April 2020, speaking on NPR, July 9, 2019.


No rhyme will tell all
names of those who fell fore telling
the fortune that befell
upon their just
deserts below the Belt
Way’s subdominant inner
circle of force
majeur subject due
with all retrospect to
unforeseen circumstances


Myron Pulier is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.