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Reviews
Halloran’s deeply felt, rigorously intelligent poems are equally attuned to the lyric and the analytic. His limits as a writer are nowhere in sight.
-Sara Manguso, author of Two Kinds of Decay
Long after official reports on the war in Afghanistan are forgotten, Colin D. Halloran’s collection — brimming with human detail and demonstrating a mastery of juxtaposition — will still resonate. It should be required reading for any public official eager to send young men and women off to battle.
-Lary Bloom
To achieve not just perspective, but an authentic and convincing point of view required both a highly disciplined sensibility and a risky willingness to put into articulate detail that which most veterans cannot speak of, let alone write about when in the theatre of war. With a sure and deft hand, Colin created a multitude of forms perfectly suited to his material and what resulted was a work of true importance.
-Elizabeth Kirschner, author of Life as a Doll
Colin Halloran’s debut collection, Shortly Thereafter, serves as a natural extension of his ongoing work with veteran’s issues and education. The raw and immediate quality of these poems reinforces the fractured and dislocated self that inhabits the uniform—the self that carries the rifle, the self that returns ‘home.’ It is testimonial poetry, the poetry of witness, poetry centered in the narrative “I.” In the lyrical “Carnivale, Tarin Kowt,” where two spaces are crafted into one temporal frame, Halloran offers a glimpse into the books he will write after Shortly Thereafter. I’m looking forward to the collections of poetry that Colin Halloran will, given time,offer to us all.
-Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise
"And this reminds me of so much else in life / which I know, / if not by name, / then simply by knowing," Colin D. Halloran writes, and we are free to read this as his Ars Poetica, reminding us that poetry begins not with the received knowledge of names, but with the naming anew of our knowledge. For Halloran's Icarus, failure is a given--he knows the story and is unafraid--but it is in the dream of flight, the anticipation of it, the preparation for it, that the poetry we need is found, and only by taking yearning to its mortal limit can youth be wholly known. These are poems of great vitality and passion.
-Richard Hoffman, author of Emblem, Love & Fury, and Noon Until Night
Media
Veteran Colin D. Halloran on Narrative Generosity
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