Impaired

In Impaired Mike Lepore presents us with a spectrum of insightful experiences of Vietnam Veterans gleaned from his many years of activity as an active volunteer and advocate for veterans' affairs. The book includes poems that tell stories of aging men once vital and strong facing the reality of age and death approaching. A wheelchair-bound man ponders why they have not come to bring him to dinner, his main concern-just one of a myriad heart-wrenching looks at children of the war in a VA hospital. Readers will visit modern Vietnam, places where lifelong and life-altering events burned themselves into the souls of so many who carried their action and their consequences back home: the Hotel Hilton, the jungle, the streets of Saigon. And you will confront the America they returned to. As in real life, there are seldom happy endings in this book, but there is understanding, empathy and an important perspective for survivors and their families and friends. As he has done so eloquently in the past, Michael Lepore deploys his poetic gifts in the service of chronicling the inexorable wreckage, emotional and physical, wrought by the Vietnam War, and by extension, by all wars. His vision is bleak, unsparing and utterly honest; he offers the reader no easy comfort or superficial appeal to patriotism and duty. The damage he describes is permanent and terrible; the victim is disabled by the destruction of his capacity to give and receive love. But we the readers are rewarded by the gift of Lepore's compassion, depth of insight and incisiveness of language. Reading Impaired is a deeply moving experience.