A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  For their generosity, not just to me but to American culture at large, I want to express my gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Without the support of their fellowship program, I simply would not have been able to do the work necessary to write this book.

  I am also very pleased to have had the opportunity to continue working with Little, Brown and Company and want to express my gratitude to the following people there. To Michael Pietsch and Reagan Arthur, your continued support for my work means the world to me. To Lee Boudreaux, it has been a pleasure to have you as an editor, and a genuine relief to know I had your insight and experience to rely on. Betsy Uhrig and Sue Betz did a wonderful job copyediting the book; checking for factual inaccuracies, correcting numerous errors of grammar and punctuation, and keeping my inveterate inability to distinguish between “lay” and “lie” from being exposed to the world. Julianna Lee is responsible for the subtly beautiful cover design, which is quite possibly the very reason you picked up this book in the first place. If you heard about the book and became interested in reading it before seeing the remarkable cover, the excellent work of Little, Brown’s marketing team, and of publicists Sabrina Callahan and Liz Garriga, probably had something to do with that. And to everyone else at Little, Brown who has had a hand in this book or either of my two previous books, I hope you know that I recognize what a real privilege it is to turn my writing in to your capable hands and watch you put it into the world.

  To Peter Straus and everyone at Rogers, Coleridge and White, without your efforts on my behalf I would still be just a guy scribbling at a desk trying to figure out how the world works. That’s still what I am, of course, but you have allowed me to do it as a profession. For that I am forever grateful.

  My friends Shamala Gallagher and Philipp Meyer read early versions of this book, and their comments improved it immensely. I also want to thank my friend Roger Reeves for allowing me to use an excerpt from his extraordinary poetry collection King Me as an epigraph.

  On a personal note, without my wife, Kelly, and two daughters, I would be lost. I won’t try to improve upon that which Randy Travis has already perfectly expressed, so just know that I’m gonna love you forever, forever and ever, amen.

  Most important, I want to thank anyone out there who has taken the time to read this book. I realize there are any number of things you could be doing with your time and money besides reading this, and I am genuinely humbled that you’ve chosen to spend it this way. My sincere hope is that you’ve found it worth your while.

  About the Author

  KEVIN POWERS is the author of The Yellow Birds, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Guardian First Book Award and was a National Book Award finalist, as well as Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, a collection of poetry. He was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener fellow in poetry. He served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq.

  Also by Kevin Powers

  The Yellow Birds

  Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

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