IN PRINT offers readers of AroundtheO a look at recent books by UO faculty and staff.

The book:

Walking Wounded, poems by Robert Hill Long

Published 2012

WordTech Editions, Cincinnati, Ohio

There is no victory in war. Everyone loses in some way, whether victim or hero. Robert Hill Long’s poems stare directly into war’s human misery, never blinking away from the gaping wounds, corpse-carrying uphill treks, or guilt-ridden memories.

Gunshot wounds that blast a child’s innocence causing a soldier to suffer from PTSD, gunshot wounds that leave a parent traumatized from an innocent child’s foray into a weapon-stocked canvass bag, body bags full of the lost hopes of innocent youth.

Long’s beautiful but often hard-to-stomach imagery doesn’t look away, even when the reader might want to.

For this, Long, who says he wrote the poems of “Walking Wounded” because “I had to,” has twice won the Winning Writers War Poetry Prize (2004, 2009), received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (2004, 1988) and Oregon Arts Commission Fellowships (1997, 2011), among other awards.

Long is the UO Assistant Director of Research Development Services. His poems have been published in many journals and his other books include “The Work of the Bow,” “The Power to Die,” and “The Effigies.”

More on Robert Hill Long can be found at roberthilllong.wordpress.com