The Stick Soldiers

"…thoughtful recollections, scary memories, articulate reflections, and the resolve of a man who has been there."—Publishers Weekly

At age nineteen, Hugh Martin withdrew from college for deployment to Iraq. After training at Fort Bragg, Martin spent 2004 in Iraq as the driver of his platoon sergeant's Humvee. He participated in hundreds of missions including raids, conducting foot patrols, clearing routes for IEDs, disposing of unexploded ordnance, and searching thousands of Iraqi vehicles. These poems recount his time in basic training, his preparation for Iraq, his experience withdrawing from school, and ultimately, the final journey to Iraq and back home to Ohio.

Hugh Martin holds an MFA from Arizona State University. He is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Hugh Martin is a graduate of Muskingum University and completed his MFA at Arizona State in May, 2012. He served six years in the Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker and spent 11 months in Iraq. His poetry centers on the narratives that crossed his path as a soldier, with a goal "to make each section vivid and strong enough to give the reader a clear idea of what each soldier is like as a human being."

Martin's work has appeared in CONSEQUENCE Magazine, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, and is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Third Coast, and the American Poetry Review. His chapbook, So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center, and was selected as part of the 7th Avenue Streetscape Series in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. In the summer of 2011 he taught introductory creative writing classes at the National University of Singapore. He will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in the fall of 2012.