Joining the military is not to be taken lightly. You're putting every part of yourself at risk, not just your body but your moral and spiritual centre.

But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision.

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.

I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.