Books

End of Active Service. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2024.

Eat the Apple. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2018.

“The Iliad of the Iraq War”

-Tim Weiner, Pulitzer Prize Winner

 

Essays

“Road Trip.” Michigan Quarterly Review. 2025.

“How Much of This is True? On the Subtle Nuances of Memoir and Autofiction.” Literary Hub. 2024.

How much of this is true?

As if the measure of a story is in its adherence to fact–

because that’s what people mean when they ask that question

about something’s truth. They want to know the story is

unimpeachable. They want to know they’re on the right side.

They want to know they’re not a sucker.

“Kinematic w/Francisco Martínezcuello.” Construction Literary Magazine. 2019.

“Stop Looking for One War Story to Make Sense of All War.” Literary Hub. 2018.

“I Hope the Military Doesn’t Change My Brother Like It Did Me.” TIME. 2018.

“Why Will You Follow Me to War, Little Brother?” Catapult. 2018.

“Clean.” Granta. 2018.

We’ll think of the boy in basic training who pissed his

trousers, and the stench of barracks rooms full of molded

low-pile carpet and Pledge surface cleaner, and the hair

dryer feeling of being in a Humvee turret behind an Abrams.

“Writing Trauma.” Powell’s Books Blog. 2018.

“Fata Morgana.” Split Lip Magazine. 2016.

You’re not going to be a vagina, are you? asks my cousin.

When I cut it out? She points to my head over dinner and

bourbon at an outdoor mall.

“Equal and Opposite.” Under the Gum Tree. 2016.

“Tracking Splits.” Yemassee Journal. 2016.

“How to Feel Ashamed For Things You Never Did.” Incoming: An Anthology of Veteran  Writing, So Say We All. 2015.

“Meeting the Mortar God.” Word Riot. 2015.

“Cold Turkey in Dogwood, Iraq.” Profane. 2015.

“A New Species of Yucca.” Tin House. 2015.

The leg juts at an unnatural angle from a mound of dirt in

the middle of the rolling hills of Iraqi desert hardpan. 

We have not slept in some hours. 

“Leaving Our Mark.” River Teeth. 2015.

“How to Throw a Drunken Punch.” BULL: Men’s Fiction. 2015.

You’ve landed on the largest of his and the smallest of yours.

It is a VW Beetle running headlong into a Mack Truck. At the

moment of impact your delusions burst into bone shards.

“Things I Learned During the War.” O-Dark-Thirty. 2014.

 

Reviews

“The Fighters By C.J. Chivers.” Popular Mechanics. 2018.

I imagine that is Chivers’s aim: to force us to sit with the

thorny nature of the thing we’ve created as people complicit

in sending others to war; to look at it and take responsibility.

We need this.

“The White Donkey By Maximilian Uriarte.” The Rumpus. 2016.

 

Fiction

“Allt Detta Kan Vara Vårt.” The Cincinnati Review. 2022.

“Combat Glide.” Monkeybicyle. 2019.

I take my daughter to the grocery store and she sits in

the seat at the rear of the shopping cart and jingles my

car keys and smiles at passersby who smile back while I

hate them and think protective parental thoughts and

lean close to her, obscure her, encase her, and move my

feet from heel to toe, gliding—the combat glide—

“Coping Mechanisms.” Consequence Magazine. 2017.

“Ghosts.” Old Northwest Review. 2015.

“Five Stages.” Midwestern Gothic. 2015.

Asteroid 12533, colloquially known as Edmond, is on a collision

course with the lunar surface. It will knock our satellite from

orbit and send an Alaska-sized chunk of the moon into Earth’s

atmosphere.

We are going to die.

“Fire and Forget.” 101 Words. 2015.

“Trouble Parts.” [PANK]. 2015.

He stores his hands in the box to seek penance, to keep

from going blind, as his mother tells him he will if he

continues touching himself after she barges into his

adolescent room at the peak of his climax, which because

of Eli’s surprise, spurts not into the waiting sock but

onto the medium pile carpet at his feet.

“Midwest Mountains.” Midwestern Gothic. 2014.

“Life Cycle of the Magicicada.” Midwestern Gothic. 2013.

“Astroturf is Forever.” Gold Man Review. 2013.