A Review of So Frag & So Bold: Short Poems, Aphorisms & Other Wartime Fun (Middle West Press, 2021) by Randy Brown

Reviewed by Eric Chandler

Randy Brown’s latest chapbook, So Frag & So Bold: Short Poems, Aphorisms & Other Wartime Fun (Middle West Press, 2021), is small and explosive. That’s why the cover image of a combination heart/grenade is so apt. Grenades are also small and explosive. 

The “Wartime Fun” comment in the title might seem odd, but humor is the sugar that makes the medicine go down. It’s hard to look directly at war. But if a poem is funny, you might be able to hang on long enough to hear what the poet is trying to say. The title also says these are short poems. True, but the words gained power for me surrounded by white space. 

I read somewhere that laughter happens when your brain gets surprised. When I read “Morning Prayer” I laughed because, my goodness, my wife and I love a cup of joe:

Coffee?

Thank God.

A short poem, for sure. There’s even a poem that ponders just how short a poem can be. Another questions what poetry is. The chapbook title comes from Brown’s parody of a William Carlos Williams poem called “This Is Just to Say.” Williams’ plums in the ice box become grenades in Brown’s poem. These poems might be a little “inside baseball,” requiring some familiarity with writing and poetry, but they still made me smirk. 

Still, this is mostly a collection that ponders war. Brown is self-aware when it comes to revisiting one’s experiences in the military. Some pieces are almost meta-poetry. Writing about war writing. In one piece called “a poem” he writes:

You don’t have to make everything

a poem, she said. 

Or about

being a Veteran.

And in his “The New Sherpatudes,” his personal list of aphorisms and nuggets of wisdom, he ends with this one-liner: Nostalgia is a disease, suffered by old soldiers. I think it’s too strong to say that reminiscing about wartime experiences is a disease. We tell stories, after all. It’s intensely human to share our stories. 

We tell those stories in different ways, which Brown covers nicely in a piece titled “blind men & veterans.” Seeing combat has been called “seeing the elephant.” He deftly combines that phrase with the old fable about several blind men describing an elephant differently based on which part of the animal they were each touching. Brown got me nodding when I read this piece:

we each describe

                           seeing the elephant

differently

As for me, I feel guilty sometimes about continuing to dwell on wartime events in my life. My disease of nostalgia. Brown dropped a truth grenade on me in a piece called “on war poetry.” Not funny, but explosive. It made me realize it’s okay to revisit some of the most important moments of my past:

we write the war /

the war writes us

even the ones

who got away clean

One time, I was dangling my toes off a dock into a Minnesota lake when a bald eagle swooped down and snagged a fish out of the calm water ten feet in front of me. The surprise of such an improbable occurrence hit my brain and I let out an explosive “HA!” like a grenade. Brown lobs many surprises that powerful, so go get yourself this chapbook. It really is So Frag & So Bold.