"Word by affecting word, image by terrifying image, these powerfully harrowing poems tell the story of modern imperial warfare, hellish technologies of death, and unacknowledged faraway victims."―Laleh Khalili, author of Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies

An innovative suite of poems for the drone age!

The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring the relationships between military drone operators and their victims. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war.' With its sophisticated interplay of diction, rhetoric, syntax, positioning, allusion, and sonic quality, this book offers a linguistically virtuosic and deeply humane x-ray of the discursive and militaristic systems that join us in mutual dissolution.

Excerpt from "Opened"

This is the box, frozen against hierarchy
at a value of some $10m, simply a form of being;

surgeon's box, patient's wound,
an idea of enclosure that can fit any medium.

The gaze is on the side of things.

The angel of evil could not have done that.

A child is in heaven. The box is empty,

saying nothing but "construction." It really is
like swatting flies; we can do it forever
easily and you feel nothing.

ANDREA BRADY (Hackney, UK) is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of seven books of poetry including The Strong Room and three books of criticism including Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint.