“Outgoing Tracers” is the first poem in All the Violent Memories and that harrowing recounting alone—of a soldier bargaining with The Almighty—would be worth the price of the collection. Stevens follows it with 22 more equally traumatic experiences where the human spirit finds a way to not just endure but to overcome. 
In a vein similar to Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon who wrote of World War I’s grimness, J.B. Stevens documents in stark prose the horrors inflicted during war and its aftermath.
This is the latest in the First Cut series from Close to The Bone.