Poetry

Among Elms, in Ambush

This powerful new work by Bruce Weigl follows the celebrated poet and Vietnam War veteran as he explores combat, survival, and PTSD in brief prose vignettes.

In compact, transcendent, and poetic prose, Bruce Weigl chronicles somber observations on the present day alongside painful memories of the war. Reflections on school shootings and the lightning-fast spread of news in the 21st century are set alongside elegies for forgotten soldiers and the lifelong struggle of waiting for the trauma of war to fade.

Haunting and nuanced, Among Elms, in Ambush carries readers through meditations and medications, past the shapes of figures in the dark rice fields of Viet Nam and the milkweed pods in the frost-covered fields of Ohio, toward a hard-won determination to survive.

Praise for Bruce Weigl

“Few books transfix me. This book did. Among Elms, in Ambush is a ghostly, mysterious, sometimes angry, mostly loving, and always masterly work of art, poetry mapped by prose, prose elevated by a poet's ear for the music of articulation. Bruce Weigl's accomplishment, if it can be described at all, struck me with the force of a prolonged and vivid dream, one moment terrifying, the next moment celebrative or indignant or regretful. The book is infused with history—Weigl’s own, America's own—yet there is nothing merely topical in these pages, unless Dante's dizzying, breathtaking Inferno can be read as topical.” —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried

“Weigl is always in at least two worlds at once—present and past; here and beyond. He poses questions of motion and emotion without easy Western answers. In fact, there’s nothing in this map of naked truths that’s easy. And, at times, this speaker of lyric reckoning holds himself accountable for the moments he said ‘I dare you.’” —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Neon Vernacular

“Few poets of any generation have written so searingly of the trauma of war, inscribing its wound while refusing the fragile suture of redemption. In this and in the breadth of his accomplishment, Bruce Weigl is one of the most important poets of our time.” —Carolyn Forché, author of What You Have Heard is True

“Weigl always finds the lyric pulse, a flame of our moment.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

FormatPaperback

Publication DateSeptember 14, 2021

ISBN9781950774418

$17.00

About the Author

Bruce Weigl is the author of over twenty books of poetry, translations and essays, most recently, Apostle of Desire (BOA, 2025), Among Elms, in Ambush (BOA, 2021), On the Shores of Welcome Home (BOA, 2019), and The Abundance of Nothing (Northwestern University Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He is the translator of Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai's The Secret of Hoa Sen (BOA, 2014). His poetry, essays, articles, reviews and translations have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, and Harpers, among a wide variety of magazines and journals. His poetry has been translated internationally into Romanian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Bulgarian, Japanese, Korean and Serbian.

Weigl has won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Creeley Award, The Cleveland Arts Prize, The Tu Do Chien Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the 2018 “Premiul Tudor Arghezi Prize” from the National Museum of Literature of Romania. He has received fellowships from Breadloaf, Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Having fought in the American War in Vietnam (Quang Tri, 1967-1968), Bruce Weigl has been working to promote mutual understanding and reconciliation between Vietnam and the US via literature and cultural exchanges for over twenty years. He is the co-translator of four Vietnamese-English poetry collections and has received a Medal for Significant Contributions from the Vietnam Union of Literature and Arts Associations and the Vietnam Writers Association, who acknowledge his efforts and success in the promotion of Vietnamese literature to the world.

He lives in Oberlin, Ohio, and in Hà Nội, Việt Nam.