Small Wars Manual

“Early in Small Wars Manual, Chris Santiago writes: ‘Dawn in a shit- / hole country.’ Then, toward the end: ‘My children / have never seen war. // It is also true / that they have never lived / without it.’ I’m getting goose bumps just typing it. Santiago hears the planetary majority’s endless aria, the one sung for centuries testifying their humanity to an impenitent martial minority. The way this book spins the mirror between what’s global and what’s domestic, and what’s history and what’s inside our bodies right now this second—it’s absolutely extraordinary, a dazzling ability I associate with only the very, very finest poets of any era. Small Wars Manual is a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I’ll be coming back to the rest of my life.”

“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.’”

“Occasionally—not often, but it happens—you read a book of poems in which you discover the present. As unsettling as a book like that can be—you had thought you were living in the present, after all—it is also a gift. Chris Santiago’s Small Wars Manual is one such gift. These poems redirect your attention to the world, and particularly the United States of America’s projection of force into it. That they do so both artfully and righteously is a further gift, not to be expected, but gratefully received. This is a book that, by guiding you to the present, changes the present.”

“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.”

“Chris Santiago’s blistering Small Wars Manual takes its name from the seminal 1940 Marine Corps tactical guide on US counterinsurgency and occupation. The poet requisitions this how-to text and—with great intelligence and heart—obliterates, deconstructs, appropriates, and reassembles its language and structure to lay bare the sickness at the core of the American imperial project. This is a restless, incisive book that surveys histories of colonization and subjugation in erasures and epistles, diagrams and cycles, including an astonishing ekphrastic sequence on the photographs of An-My Lê. Small Wars Manual advances the literature of truth-telling and dissent in poems that insist ‘Even souls // have souls. / Even the enemy.”