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MWSA Review
Impaired: The Continuing Crisis for Vietnam Veterans by Michael Lepore is a heartfelt and moving tribute to those who served during that war. Lepore’s latest installment of poetry books focusing on Vietnam includes an additional theme: the recognition of mortality that comes with old age.
Most combat veterans are forced to come to grips with their mortality as young men and women. After coming face to face with death repeatedly during that war, Vietnam veterans are now dealing with another, even more intractable foe: the Old Man’s Grim Reaper. As Lepore deftly points out in several of his poems, these vets are getting old and facing the end of their lives—often without much support, and frequently while also fighting the ghosts of that now long-past, and still unpopular conflict.
Review by John Cathcart (May 2021)
Author's Synopsis
Poems in this collection provide glimpses into the hearts and minds of Vietnam War combat veterans, men who were once vital and strong facing the reality of age and approaching death. Some of the veterans in these poems are at war with themselves, some return to the country where their youth was lost and some fear for the future. As in real life, there are seldom happy endings to these stories. They are not anti-war poems or pro-war poems; they just tell it the way it was and the way it is.
ISBN/ASIN: 978-1-943826-77-3
Book Format(s): Soft cover
Review Genre: Poetry—Poetry Book
Number of Pages: 50