City of God

Everett’s writing returns, briefly, to Wittgenstein, who wrote during his time in the trenches of World War I that his soul was “finally inviolable by circumstance” (126). Everett then begins a long, open-verse poem titled “Author’s Bio” that tells the story of his upbringing and his father’s service in World War I. In it, he says he was born to Ben and Ruth during the Great Depression, and that he has an older brother as well as another sibling who did not survive; he lays all of this out as a way to position himself as a person qualified to speak for the century. He is writing this from the perspective of the present, with his father dead for forty years and his mother more recently, and he is attempting to understand the mystery of them.

His father Ben served in the Navy during WWI, and during that time he is assigned to be a land observer in the trenches. He’s stationed with an Army signal unit, and when telegraph communications became impossible, they became runners, sending information back from the front lines to the commanders on foot. When the lieutenant is killed, Ben takes on the leadership role and eventually finds himself the last living member of his adopted unit.