Small Wars Manual: Poems

＂Small Wars Manual is a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I’ll be coming back to the rest of my life.＂--Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.

Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, ＂a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination.＂ In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.

Highly conceptual yet gut-wrenching, this meticulous and visionary masterpiece of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric. In more autobiographical sections, Chris Santiago’s own Filipino immigrant background reveals hard-lived experiences, where ＂stars can guide // either bayonets // or refugees＂ and ＂even small wars waged // on the living room floor＂ cause trepidation and harm.

This righteous collection redeems the vulnerable from the aggressors--empire, army, their systems and tools--and transforms everything in the process. In the hands of Santiago, the deconstructive becomes the eviscerating, condemning all wars that upend countries and mark generations. Here are shining poems that make shelter of chaos, by one of the most skillful and intrepid poets writing today.

Chris Santiago’s debut collection Tula was selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Copper Nickel, Conduit, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and American Public Media’s The Slowdown. His collaboration with composer Lembit Beecher and ethnographer Todd Lawrence, Say Home, was commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and received its world premiere in 2019. A Loft Poetry Mentor and Fellow of the McKnight Foundation, the Mellon Foundation/ACLS, and Kundiman, he received his PhD from the University of Southern California and recently joined the Faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Santa Clarita, CA. He lives in Pasadena.