Airplane Graveyard by Bryce Johle

…”time is funny / hindsight seems to bring you clarity, but it’s more like / since past is past, I have a hold on it like leashed dogs / and can bend it to my will…” Bryce Johle’s Airplane Graveyard explores a range of subjects: childhood, family, becoming a father. But at the center of this book–shadowy, turbulent, glimpsed only fleetingly–is Johle’s father, a Vietnam veteran shrouded in the mystery and half-century history of that war. In memorable language these poems confront the legacy of Johle’s father, and all those fathers, once young boys themselves, who came back changed by that war. As Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead. It’s not even past. Airplane Graveyard is a beautiful and auspicious debut.

–George Bilgere

Bryce Johle’s Airplane Graveyard interrogates conceptions of masculinity as it explores the relationship between an adult son and his Vietnam veteran father. The book’s graveyard contains the specters of war and the father’s buried but ever-present past. Even as the speaker works to carve out his own relationship to family and emotional intimacy, he must also look back, unearthing the “confused wounds” of the past, bringing what’s buried carefully into the light. These poems are written with sensitivity, compassion, and keen perception.

–Dr. Claire McQuerry

In Bryce Johle’s hard-won and heartfelt Airplane Graveyard, the poems come through. That is: The poems are both of lived experience as much as they are deliverers of their own dramatic world. Do we need reminding of how essential it is to transform wound into art? I think so. In this age of gimmick and marketeering, Airplane Graveyard is a refreshing reminder of the simple truth that we never fully outrun that which shapes us, that we serve the art as much as it serves us. In language direct and unadorned, work life, marriage life, the whole shebang, Johle’s unapologetic engagement of the past frames and figures our understanding of the present. It’s a book about laying things finally on the table in order to reckon a peace.

–James Hoch