Honorable Manhood: Poems of Eros & Dust

Written just after the physical and moral devastation of the Gulf War, Elliot Richman takes as his title a phrase form a letter Sullivan Ballou, a Civil War officer, wrote to this wife on the eve of the battle in which he was killed. This book-length sequence of poems chronicles an illicit affair between a painter and the wife of an Air Force pilot participating in the bombing of Iraq in the Persian Gulf.