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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.
The Stick Soldiers reveal[s] Iraq in all its real and imagined dangers in a language that is somber, angry, deeply reflective, but also intensely, if not darkly humorous. The collection is an approachable, necessary volume of poems about what it was like to prepare for war, serve in Iraq, and return to Ohio 'a body / much less / without the plated-vest, the ammo.' -M.K. Sukach, War Literature & the Arts The Stick Soldiers is a journey you don't want to miss. Especially if you care about the soldiers our country sent to war and if you want to help them come home. -Bookscover2cover The Stick Soldiers deserves a wide audience. It has much to tell us about the cost of war on our veterans. - Rain Taxi As America's withdrawal from Iraq fades amidst more recent events, it becomes even more important to read books like The Stick Soldiers to give voice and image to just what contemporary war constitutes for soldiers like Martin. --Mark Allen Jenkins, American Microreviews and Interviews Martin's book, The Stick Soldiers, released in 2013, is filled with this kind of comedie noire, a knowing authority which seems deeply suspicious not only of its own attempts to reduce the war to language but also of the capacity of its civilian audience to comprehend this language. -Los Angeles Review of Books
