Small Wars Manual

“Chris Santiago poignantly combines text, visuals, and reverse erasures, along with sources past and present, to offer a thrilling and multifaceted assemblage of poems that confronts the casual and quotidian nature of warfare. From the Philippines to Vietnam and elsewhere, Santiago powerfully reconstructs the language and images found in a war training manual standardized by the United States government, and then out of that wreckage comes fragmented poems crafted with stunning precision. This collection delivers a brilliant reframing of the dark and vicious reality behind state-sponsored projects of war, along with the personal and collective losses endured by those who survive its outcomes.”
 

“A beautifully wrought book about the relationship between language and war. The power in these poems lies within absence, silence, and the interstitial spaces between language. The power in these poems also lies within the often-flat tone of military diction and the diction of manuals. Despite the brutality of war and the language of war, these erasure poems ultimately point toward music: ‘Inland are cities of light / sprawling machines / that can traverse the past,’ Santiago says. ‘The engine / is made of singing.’”

“An innovative poetic exploration of the oft-forgotten legacy of US militarism and colonialism in the Philippines. With deft craftsmanship, Santiago ‘salvages’ fragments from this history into poems of witness wrought from letters, words, and silences to offer an urgent instruction in compassion and a call to confront America’s stories of empire and resistance. As Santiago reminds us, ‘out of fragments one could learn,’ and in these poems, we are taught to see anew. This is a collection for readers who dare to imagine a different future by learning from and reengaging the past. Santiago’s work is not only an act of salvage, but also one of reclamation—a confrontation with the violence of empire, transformed into reckoning.”