Like lips drawing poison from a rattlesnake bite, The Indignity of Knowing maps Albritton's marriage with an Army Special Forces soldier onto America's love affair with honor and violence. Albritton's intimate and overflowing voice reveals the landscape of war to be no foreign country but a home, a marriage, a family made of oaths and betrayal.
LIAM CORLEY, author of Unwound: Poems from Enduring Wars and Changelings: Insurgence
Albritton's tender and unflinching lyric excavates what it means to be a wife, mother, lover, and resilient "Boss Bitch" in this stunning debut that explores the emotional, psychological, and international stakes of the "thousand insecurities that come / with marrying a Special Forces Soldier." No one is left unscathed, and it is astonishing to witness this journey.
DIANA KHOI NGUYEN, author of Root Fractures and Ghost Of, a finalist for the National Book Award
Part love song and part poetic rant, this memoir in verse depicts military family life across generations in raw and intimate language. Amber Albritton chronicles the other true war story, with an urgency that wants us to reckon with how "the war comes home." These are fearless, beautiful poems.
PAMELA HART, author of Mothers Over Nangarhar
The Indignity of Knowing is a reaping. A harvest of lyricism, ripe and as sweet as a once-was lover. Albritton's collection autopsies the bad fruit shadowed dark with America's history. Each poem is freshly different yet vine-like in their connections to each other with shared hums of tenderness and the bellows of its absence.
MONICA BRASHEARS, author of House of Cotton: A Novel
There's so much complexity to recognize and spend time with here, complexity that welcomes the reader with both familiarity and surprise. It's the nuance of personhood and motherhood, of spouse and servicemember that makes these poems memorable and timely. I'm so relieved when I find poems that can hold contradictions and questions at the same time as love and devotion, because this is what it means to live and evolve and lean toward knowing ourselves better.
ABBY E. MURRAY, author of Hail and Farewell and How to Be Married after Iraq
At times full of sass and Brasso, and other times exposed and raw, Amber Albritton's poems explode with fresh literary ideas and lived-experiences.
RANDY BROWN, author of Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire
