When You Come Again, You Will Never Go

We at Unlikely are proud to (finally!) present the winner of the First Annual WRITE REAL GOOD Poetry Chapbook Contest: Andreas Morgner's manuscript, When You Come Again, You Will Never Go. The contest ran through the latter half of 2009, and was judged by Michael Harold, Anne McMillen, and Belinda Subraman, who were assisted by Violetta Tarpinain and Lisa Renée Vincent. It's a long manuscript—its twenty-three poems are detailed and complex—and in the process of forming it into a book, we found it appropriate to include a number of journalistic photographs, especially from Ed Kashi.

Andreas spent twenty years in the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2001, he decided to seek a more active career path and got a job with the U.S. Department of the Treasury investigating African war crimes as well as drugs and arms smuggling. In 2008, Treasury assigned him to U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), a military headquarters based in Stuttgart, Germany. While he spends much of his time at AFRICOM, he travels frequently to Africa as well as back to his home near Washington, D.C.

The emotional intensity of his work, and the distance between his work and the average American's understanding of it, should be clear without any of the feeble descriptions we could offer. Andreas is erudite, intelligent, and passionate, so when he describes these issues, he writes poems. He writes poems that bear little resemblance to the bulk of American contemporary poetry; shocking and disorienting pieces that could never come from lives as comfortable as ours.

When You Come Again, You Will Never Go is exactly what a publisher hopes for when we run a contest. Although talented and clever, Andreas Morgner will never get a Creative Writing job, nor will he sit around literary conferences hoping to find an agent to schmooze. He is an "outsider artist" in a way an "underground writer" can never be; his work gives us a set of experiences and insights that simply can't be found through the poetry world's normal networking structure.

This was a difficult book to publish and a painful book to read. We know that you'll find it as uncomfortable as we do. And we believe that, upon reading it, you'll be as grateful as we are to have shared some of Andreas' discomfort and insight—to experience some of the benefits of his hard-won poetic education.

When You Come Again, You Will Never go contains twenty-three poems by Andreas Morgner and eight photographs from Ed Kashi, Julien Harneis, MSGT Rose Reynolds, Amnesty International and the international Peace Information Service, and several unknown photographers. It's available for just $10.