Terminal Leave by F. S. Blake

Frank Blake has joined a growing list of veterans attempting to bridge the civil-military divide through his voice.  The poems in Terminal Leave show a world that is incompatible with the tired abstract talking points of freedom and support the troops.  These poems, rather, give the reader a view through the soldier’s senses, the smell of burning, the feel of radiating heat long after dark, the sound of generators and night music from the desert and the transcendent sight of bright stars in the middle of nowhere.  This life, ‘unable to fit back into . . . pre-detonation shape,’ shows readers the distance between the person who left and the person who returned, that the lives of our warriors resist being limited to a single easy story.

–D.A. Gray, author of Contested Terrain