Poetic Prosthetics

Examines contemporary online soldier poetry and graphic novel writing in the first book-length study of its kind

• Offers a new perspective on the effect of violence on individual personalities as well as on the ability of veterans to reintegrate into society by addressing the damage done to language as an injury"
• Counters one major narrative in the understanding of soldiers' wartime experiences in terms of political/ideological "disillusionment," by focusing on damage done to the personal ability to communicate and identify as either "alive" or "human"
• Offers an understanding of the ways veterans use writing to create a bridge between their former lives and post-war and post-violence reality
• Questions the ability to neatly "demilitarize" after war, offering instead the metaphor of the prosthesis, that a tool – writing – enables one to hobble back to life after the traumatic encounter with military power and violence

Poetic Prosthetics provides an analytical tool for reading war and trauma literature, focussing on contemporary British and American soldier writing, published online in various forums by the soldiers themselves since the onset of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in some cases, recent writings of veterans of the Falkland War.

The book presents a new perspective on the effect of violence on individual personalities as well as on the ability of veterans to reintegrate into society by addressing the damage done to language as an injury. It highlights that soldiers work through an incompatibility between a former way of life and their new linguistic reality by forming a different mode of speaking, through literature or poetry. The independent nature of these poems sheds light on the process of returning to life through writing, and on the life-giving force of literature for repatriated veterans.