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Sonja Yelich’s Get Some is a daring departure from her previous, award-winning collection, Clung. It follows an American marine, Edgar, serving in Iraq, and the responses of his family back home to his tour of ‘doody’. Yelich vividly contrasts his life with his family’s, and serves up a whirlwind of perspectives on the war and contemporaryy American life from ‘The Sopranos’ to ‘Black Hawk Down’, YouTube to SUVs.

The narrative of Edgar and his family begins to fragment through the book as the horror of war deepens – a marine loses a leg and a plane ‘breaks its nose on / Poor visibility in summer’. Yelich, highlighting the confusion of war, leaves a reader guessing as to Edgar’s eventual fate. Chilling, funny, sad and thought-provoking, Get Some is the work of a writer pushing the capacities of language to express the potential of violence to erupt in everyday life.

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Reviews

Get Some is an important, well considered and well executed work that not only grips and entertains the reader but also offers a principled and coherent critique of American culture and politics. – Helen Dennes, The Warwick Review

This is an originally conceived collection, and one with spine and gall. Sonja Yelich’s poetry is strong, evocative and ambitious. – Jessica Le Bas, Nelson Mail

Yelich's poems are like watching photos deepen in a flat pan of developer. Gradually things become clearer and sharper; leap into focus and make sense. – Jenny Argante, A Fine Line