Finalist for the 2025 Governor General's Literary AwardFinalist for the 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel AwardWinner of the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book PrizeA powerful debut novel about four young soldiers serving in Afghanistan, and the devastating aftermath of war."An unvarnished, intimately informed dissection of war's physical and emotional derangements." – Omar El Akkad,...

Benjamin Hertwig’s debut collection of poetry*, Slow War,* is at once an account of contemporary warfare and a personal journey of loss and the search for healing. It stands in the tradition of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Kevin Powers’s “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.”A century after the First World War, Hertwig presents both the personal cost of war in poems such as “Somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan” and “Food Habits of Coyotes, as Determined by Exam...

Benjamin Hertwig’s debut collection of poetry*, Slow War,* is at once an account of contemporary warfare and a personal journey of loss and the search for healing. It stands in the tradition of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Kevin Powers’s “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.”A century after the First World War, Hertwig presents both the personal cost of war in poems such as “Somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan” and “Food Habits of Coyotes, as Determined by Exam...