Still Looking for Neuzil by Michael Fredson

I love the fluidity of memory and identity in Still Looking for Neuzil because both are pungent with terror and love.  Time is against the speaker because he is against himself as movingly as the speakers in the best dark Coleridge poems.  The veteran de-creates the world and the self in an attempt, however desperate, to make peace with “Being Back in the World.”  In Fredson’s  poems this hopeful and disheartening mantra burns far into the 21^st Century.  Still Looking for Neuzil should receive the fanfare of a book like Catch 22 if “Americans in the 21^st Century still have the capacity to feel.  I consider the terse, obsessive quality of this book, and, though it is not fashionable to quote Arthur Rimbaud, I will: Fredson’s book fulfills Rimbaud’s exhortation that a visionary must sustain “a long, boundless, systematized disorganization of the senses.  All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness.”

–Rich Lyons , Author of Un Poco Loco

This is a book about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Mike offers us a powerful voice that at once becomes poetry as therapy.  He takes us into the horrors of the Vietnam War and its lifelong psychological cost to him through a direct and deeply personal exploration of war trauma.  He doesn’t speak about his PTSD; he speaks from it.  This book is a gift to all soldiers who live in the dissonance between war and civilian life, as well as the psychotherapists who work with them.

–Angelina Renes, Psychotherapist

If war poetry, or, more specifically, the poetry of soldiering, has focused on experiences within war—its moments of no return, of being at peak intensity or in the contrasting troughs of waiting, of intgrospection—then Fredson’s poems aim at something else: the life sentence of veteran-ship.  Still Looking for Neuzil is a longitudinal reckoning with the fifty years since Fredson’s service in the Vietnam-American War.  The war continues to kill well beyond any theater of combat.  Ghosts crowd out family.  The instinct to disguise oneself as human, day in and day out, after such utter de-humanization, is obscene.  The war wears through, always, eventually.  The speaker’s life is overwhelmed by his service timed and by the war, even as the war is forgotten or revised in our national and popular memory.  Still Looking for Neuzil is crucial reading in a country now permanently at war.

–Sarah Vap, author of Winter: Effulgences and Devotions