"In his ruminative debut, The War Makes Everyone Lonely, Graham Barnhart documents in fugitive snapshots the service in Afghanistan and Iraq of a US Army medic, who returned to the States searching for words to describe realities that may have no words, yet require them. Keenly observant about the tension between complicity and bravery, war and the homefront, Barnhart finds himself 'dressed like the men who killed / their husbands, [passing out] sewing machines / to widows so they could make clothes / for their children and embroider cemetery flags.' Here is a poetry that performs 'Notice and Focus'—neither shrieking nor staying silent about the terrible rubble of the Terror Wars. And yet, it still dreams of waking up to nudges from horses, black garbage scrap in barbed wire, and a love that's 'so clear and thin / it couldn’t be seen.'"

Philip Metres, author of "The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance"

“Graham Barnhart’s remarkable debut collection is at once a soldier’s searing field report and a brilliant lyric response to 21st century war. With gravity, precision and grace, he writes ‘As an aggressor / aware of his complicity.’ As a medic working under fire and in the debris fields of the aftermath, he brings to his art uncommon gifts of attention and inclusion: not only combatants, but civilians, not only the ‘catalog of fire’ but ‘stillness / raveled rather than torn.’ In this age of drones and eternal occupation, Barnhart inscribes extremity anew, joining the company of those writing from the trenches of the Great War and beyond, an equal among them.”

Carolyn Forché, author of "What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance"

"The War Makes Everyone Lonely demonstrates compassion for the all those dispossessed by the invasions, including the soldiers whose minds are invaded by the memories of what they have participated in."

Green Left