Dog Tags and Ghost Roads

This collection knows exactly who it's for — veterans, their families, and the clinicians and case workers who sit with them — and it doesn't waste its five sections getting there. The strongest work happens when Lee stops reaching for archangels and sea-gods and lands on the specific: a hearing-aid fitting for a 95-year-old WWII veteran ("The Deafening Sound of Silence"), and especially "The Decision," a prose-poem about Sergeant James Carter recognizing intimate-partner violence at home and reaching for a hotline. That poem — "He closed his eyes, feeling the weight of every deployment, every promise to stay strong" — is doing real public-health work that most veteran poetry collections don't attempt, and it earns its place.

The 'Coming Home' section is where the book's emotional core lives. The family-perspective poems — a wife watching her husband hold a coffee cup 'as if it were the last warm thing in a cold world,' a daughter's crayon suns taped to a fridge as 'a small gallery of hope' — understand that reintegration is a shared trauma, not a solo one, and render it in domestic, unglamorous detail rather than slogans. That choice to write from the spouse's and child's point of view, repeatedly, is the book's most generous and least clichéd move.

The rhymed tribute poems (one per branch, built around the Army's core values) are more workmanlike and will read as familiar to anyone who's sat through a retirement ceremony — but that's precisely their intended venue. For the reader this book is actually for — a VFW hall, a spouse trying to understand what their partner won't say out loud — it delivers.