Welcome to our Fall Issue, 2021: War and Peace.
It’s hard to believe that this issue marks the two-year anniversary of Mason Street Review.
In this issue, we’re thinking of the wars fought and endured by others; from full-blown coverage of war in the global news on TV and social media to our unsung, private battles of the spirit . . . and to pieces about survival and thriving of all kinds.
Check out our guest columnist Omar El Akkad‘s My Library Memories. The author of What Strange Paradise and American War has a journalism career which coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world.
Read the visceral poems of poet and teacher Brian Turner (author of Here, Bullet, Phantom Noise, and My Life as a Foreign Country) who served for seven years in the US Army (he was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000).
Also read the writings of our enlisted who searched for identity upon returning home, and the poems of mothers and daughters of soldiers, and of civilians who experienced their own battles with physical abuse.
We sought sensitive poems and stories on the true, personal cost and consequence of war as well as investigations into the nature of peace with a focus on its more complicated, subtle, human aspect and continuing toll. We investigated the complexities, asked the difficult questions, and our writers and photographers delivered. Launching this issue on Veterans Day, we attempt to honor them here.∎
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