Ex Ophidia Press, paperback
Publication Date: June 20, 2025
Publisher Marketing: Recovery Commands is a book of poems about the collision of military and civilian life found inside one loving, long-term, and contradictory marriage. Two people, each informed by and embedded within cultures that would seem to be at odds with one another, somehow hold fast to each other through decades of war and its lasting legacies. This book follows the impacts of violent conflict and deployment on a family through one pacifist, nonbinary poet’s perspective, but it speaks to a universal sense of inner conflict that so many humans experience while trying to love each other in a violent, unjust world. These poems manage to map out the paths human compassion takes to survive political upheaval and confounding military traditions, and they do so by leaning on humor, wit, and deep care for humanity. Recovery Commands is an instruction manual for how to love despite the practical reasons not to.
