REVIEW OF JEHANNE DUBROW’S CIVILIANS
by Libby Kurz
As soon as I heard about Jehanne Dubrow’s new poetry collection, Civilians (LSU Press, February 2025), I was eager to read it. As a former Air Force officer turned military spouse, I understand both sides of the soldier-civilian divide and I was curious, as I am with all literature, how I might find myself within its pages. Civilians is the third volume of a trilogy about modern military spousehood, the poet now exploring her husband’s final transition from active-duty to civilian life and its impact on her marriage.
The title alone reminded me of an evening twenty years ago when my college friends first heard me use the term “civilians” to describe them. I was fresh out of officer training, touting my new military verbiage, when they chided, “Oh, so we’re just civilians now?” I chuckled, a bit embarrassed, realizing how the word must have sounded to them, as though I was at the center of something vital and they were outliers. It wasn’t unlike the distinction between the gods and mere mortals in Greek mythology, a metaphor that Dubrow plays upon throughout the collection. If this single word had yielded an immediate sense of otherness to my college pals, how much more intensely would a military spouse feel this distinction? But Dubrow knows all too well that within a marriage, the line between military and civilian becomes blurred, and war is a joint endeavor that costs both spouses too much. It is this tension between division and union, distance and closeness, god and mortal that churns the collection forward like a ship across choppy waters.
The book employs the three-act structure of ancient Greek theatre to chart the transformation of its characters. The narrative arc within the entire collection is also captured within the opening poem, “What Do You Give the War That Has Everything” (3), in which the couple offers its annual anniversary gifts to the war they are serving. They begin, naïve and hopeful, with the gift of paper: “Dear war,// we said, we are sending ourselves/ folded inside gilded envelopes––/ we have stamped your name in wax.” But as the years pass and disillusionment takes hold, they lose count of “the years of pearl and coral,/ the ruby like a puncture wound, the poison blue of sapphire set in gold.” Like the boy taking from the generous tree in Shel Silverstein’s beloved children’s book, the sacrifice becomes unending, and Dubrow reflects that the war “took everything we had to give.”
Within this context of loss and sacrifice, the poet explores questions that fuel the entire collection: How do two people, both separated and bound by war, find their way back to each other once “the sailor is forced to stay on land” (38)? What if their union has even come to rely on war and the distance it creates? And how can a relationship transform when the adrenaline of military life is relinquished for mundane domesticity, when one merely becomes “a hand without/ salute, a body left in its unease” (49)? Within these resonant questions for which no easy answers exist, the soul of the book dwells.
These questions are further enriched by the poetic devices of repetition and imagery. ‘Civilians’ is not just the title of the collection as a whole; the word in its singular form is also the title of four individual poems laced throughout, like the repeating chorus of a Greek drama. The first “civilian” poem is a villanelle with the following opening lines, the first and third of which create a haunting refrain:
I bring our war into my bed each night
and let it press metallic to my cheek.
I barely move beneath the trembling light
that it emits, a semaphore both bright
and shadowy, its messages oblique (6).
With these lines, Dubrow highlights the contradiction that war, amid all of its oppression, is also a source of fascination, its light both blinding and brilliant to soldier and civilian alike. As written later in the love sonnet, “A War is Forever,” the speaker admits, “Darling, we said to the shine of war,/ nothing is more dazzling than your love” (21). But eventually, it’s a love that abandons and betrays, and the poet’s dissonance as she grapples with such a bind provides a relatable thread for her readers to follow. This is a world where the hard angles of metal repeatedly meet the soft linens of a marriage bed, and the heart has trouble picking a side (15).
While Dubrow masterfully executes formal poetic structures such as the villanelle and sonnet, I found the free verse poems with specific, ordinary images most gripping. The second part of the book consists of a single poem titled “Metamorphoses,” in which the god-like spouse undergoes his descent into mere mortalhood. At last, the soldier becomes a civilian. By the third act, the language follows suit, shifting from formal and ethereal to quotidian and gritty. In “Some Final Notes on Odysseus,” Dubrow reflects,
Poems always end before the peace,
the orchard overgrown now.
No one wants to read a scene
of the old soldier pulling weeds,
pruning the wildness back, his arms
still strong but not with violence” (43-44).
But thank God, Dubrow defies convention and continues her poems, inviting us into the unsexy reality after the spark of war goes dull. Finally, the wife’s building anger over the injustice and hypocrisy of war gets expressed in the poem, “Domestic Policy” (63). The poet begins, “Today I didn’t say divorce/ because I was sickened by/ the news/ from Afghanistan, translators and their families/ left waiting at the gates,/ while American personnel/ lifted off/ in the wide indifference of their transport planes.” Later she continues, “Marriage is two people/ shouting about spices,/ the ordering of jars––by alphabet or continent––/ as if everything depends on an ounce of turmeric fading/ under glass.” In the poet’s mundane moments of fury and annoyance, when the cost of military life catches up in concrete ways, the writing becomes most resonant and real. War is no longer a distant, romantic generality. It is a tangible, endless reality. I imagine Dubrow could pen an entire fourth volume of about post-war, domestic experiences.
Finally, Dubrow’s brilliant collection reminds the reader that whether military or civilian, Odysseus or Penelope, marriage is an ongoing warzone, the ultimate odyssey. No identity is ever final, but renewal must be chosen and daily surrendered to, our edges softened. Like the husband in the final rendition of the poem “Civilian” (66), perhaps we all carry two dog tags around our necks. One to remain with our body, the other for the hands of our beloved.
Libby Kurz (she/her) is a writer, registered nurse, and US Air Force veteran. She holds a BS in Nursing from UNC-Charlotte and a MFA in Creative Writing from National University. Her work appears in The Iowa Review, Ruminate, The Other Journal, Literary Mama, and Driftwood Press, among others. She’s the author of a poetry chapbook, The Heart Room, published by Finishing Line Press in 2019, and an excerpt from her memoir in progress was a winner of The Iowa Review’s 2022 Jeff Sharlet Memorial Prize for Veterans. She has taught poetry and creative nonfiction workshops for The Muse Writers Center, The Wounded Warrior Project, and The Armed Services Arts Partnership. After a decade of moving cross country with the military, she resides in Virginia Beach with her husband, three teenagers, and 115-lb. lap dog.