When You Come Again, You Will Never Go

By Andreas Morgner

We at Unlikely are proud to (finally!) present the winner of the First Annual WRITE REAL GOOD Poetry Chapbook Contest: Andreas Morgner's manuscript, When You Come Again, You Will Never Go. The contest ran through the latter half of 2009, and was judged by Michael Harold, Anne McMillen, and Belinda Subraman, who were assisted by Violetta Tarpinain and Lisa Renée Vincent. It's a long manuscript—its twenty-three poems are detailed and complex—and in the process of forming it into a book, we found it appropriate to include a number of journalistic photographs, especially from Ed Kashi.

Andreas spent twenty years in the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2001, he decided to seek a more active career path and got a job with the U.S. Department of the Treasury investigating African war crimes as well as drugs and arms smuggling. In 2008, Treasury assigned him to U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), a military headquarters based in Stuttgart, Germany. While he spends much of his time at AFRICOM, he travels frequently to Africa as well as back to his home near Washington, D.C.

The emotional intensity of his work, and the distance between his work and the average American's understanding of it, should be clear without any of the feeble descriptions we could offer. Andreas is erudite, intelligent, and passionate, so when he describes these issues, he writes poems. He writes poems that bear little resemblance to the bulk of American contemporary poetry; shocking and disorienting pieces that could never come from lives as comfortable as ours.

When You Come Again, You Will Never Go is exactly what a publisher hopes for when we run a contest. Although talented and clever, Andreas Morgner will never get a Creative Writing job, nor will he sit around literary conferences hoping to find an agent to schmooze. He is an "outsider artist" in a way an "underground writer" can never be; his work gives us a set of experiences and insights that simply can't be found through the poetry world's normal networking structure.

This was a difficult book to publish and a painful book to read. We know that you'll find it as uncomfortable as we do. And we believe that, upon reading it, you'll be as grateful as we are to have shared some of Andreas' discomfort and insight—to experience some of the benefits of his hard-won poetic education.

When You Come Again, You Will Never go contains twenty-three poems by Andreas Morgner and eight photographs from Ed Kashi, Julien Harneis, MSGT Rose Reynolds, Amnesty International and the international Peace Information Service, and several unknown photographers. It's available for just $10.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unlikely Books
• Release date: Sep 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476320830

Book preview

What people are saying about

When You Come Again, You Will Never Go

I am listening to your work on your publisher’s site as I write this and I am deeply moved by it. Not just by the subject matter, but by the compassion that would move you to attempt to articulate your relationship to it with such a transformative lens and tongue.

—Chris Abani, Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction and author of Sanctificum

"Forget TV, America. It’s time to visit other countries. For the wars we don’t see may be the ones we condone. And the ones we condone might just be the ones we inhabit.

Stop for lunch in Sierra Leone, a Congo-side jungle tour and hospital visit, the heart’s last go-round in Mozambique: Andreas Morgner knows all the right sights to immerse us in, climax after bloody climax.

—Amy King, author of Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country and I'm the Man Who Loves You

It’s very difficult, today, to write poetry about war. The horrors of the visual media make any literary form seem almost too pretty. And yet Andreas Morgner manages to capture the cruelty of continuing warfare in Africa without sentimentality, while reflecting on the complicit support and encouragement of conflict by the arms trade. His poems reveal not only the violence, but also the everyday banality of horror ever present on this besieged continent.

—Anton Krueger, author of Chatter

"Andreas Morgner's When You Come Again, You Will Never Go is hauntingly true to the images of our new, scarred world of endless gunfire, a telling without which the survivor's tale would be otherwise lost. This is my story, your story, our story. When you read these poems, they will never leave you. They will break your heart over and over with fire and smoke, the dead and the dying coming alive. Here, poetic lines stand between the gunfire and the victim of gunfire. But these poems span an entire world, an entire continent where pain is for both the victim and the tale bearer. Andreas sees a world through the lenses of an outsider, becoming an insider. This is a necessary voice where survival is not only about the survivor."

—Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, author of The River is Rising

"Andreas Morgner is an American who has visited African countries and worked with its people over many years. His engagement with the lives and suffering of African peoples, his compassion and deep concern to record something of what he knows is evident in every poem. This slim volume of compelling, moving and sometimes shocking poems shows us something of the multiple tragedies of the African continent and the spirit of its peoples. The stark honesty and vivid detail of Andreas Morgner's accounts are like