Headlines; Brian Turner, "Here, Bullet"

The big headline in the International Herald Tribune today:

"Rice to return to Mideast with plan"

I don't know which is worse: the idea that she had no clue what to do on her previous trip(s) to the Mideast, or the idea that she is bringing a plan from Bush along, whose previous plans for the Mideast have not been particularly successful.

It makes me want to stop reading the newspaper. I get the same reaction when I read The New Yorker sometimes: there's yet another article about how badly things are going in Iraq, and all it makes me want to read is Brian Turner's poetry collection Here, Bullet. Turner was a GI in Iraq, and his collection is uncannily powerful. Poetry is indeed "news that stays news," as Ezra Pound said. Three poems from the book are on-line from when they were published in The Georgia Review.