Juiceboxers (2024)

Out September 17, 2024! Published by Freehand Books.

Sixteen-year-old Plinko, attending basic training in the summer before high school starts up again in the fall, acquired his nickname when he happened to mention The Price is Right to another recruit. Feeling adrift from his own family after graduation, Plinko moves in with an older soldier, where he forges an unlikely group of friends: Walsh, who moves in shortly after Plinko does; Abdi, whose Somalian immigrant parents often welcome the group of young men over for dinner; and the unpredictable and gun-loving Krug, who is brash and exasperating yet magnetic. The four are variously involved with the military – Plinko, for instance, works as a reservist on weekends and Wednesday evenings – and they fill their days with school, part-time jobs, watching movies, ordering pizza, playing video games late into the night.

And then – 9/11. As the military prepares to move into Afghanistan, the trajectories of the four friends’ lives are changed irrevocably.

Drawn from the author’s experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan, Juiceboxers tenderly traces the story of a young man’s journey from basic training, to the battlefields of Kandahar, to the oil fields of Alberta, braiding together questions of masculinity and militarism, friendship and violence, loss and trauma, ideology and innocence.

Praise for Juiceboxers

“Juiceboxers is an unvarnished, intimately informed dissection of war’s physical and emotional derangements. So many moments in Benjamin Hertwig’s dark but ultimately tender novel reminded me, with eerie precision, of things I had seen and heard while covering the invasion of Afghanistan – the marrow-deep racism; the casual bloodlust; the desperate need to belong to something, anything. To read this book is to contend with what the enterprise of industrial-scale violence can do to its most active participants, the many ways in which one emerges from so bloody a thing dislocated from who they used to be.” OMAR EL AKKAD author of What Strange Paradise and American War

“Juiceboxers is not a coming-of-age story – it is a coming to grips story. The reader is lulled through desert days and nights where time is absent, but the bravado and bigotry of war isn’t. From the sandy hills and mountains of Afghanistan to the slushy streets of Edmonton, Hertwig’s poetic prose leaves us with a sense of hope . . . [Hertwig’s words] do not shy away from horror and healing.” NORMA DUNNING author of Tainna and Annie Muktuk and Other Stories

“Juiceboxers is a fiercely honest portrait of young soldiers fighting a war Canada would rather forget and then discovering that it has followed them home. Benjamin Hertwig’s debut novel is an unflinching act of remembrance, a tale of brotherhood and prejudice, and a moving portrait of lives and friendships forged and torn apart.” THOMAS WHARTON author of The Book of Rain and Icefields

“Tempering harshness with tenderness and humour, Benjamin Hertwig’s Juiceboxers maps external and internal territories of conflict with sure grasp of character. A gripping addition to the canon of the literature of war and what comes after.” NABEN RUTHNUM author of A Hero of Our Time

Slow War (2017)

Published August 15, 2017 by McGill-Queen's University Press.

Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Raymond Souster Award, and recipient of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award.
 

Benjamin Hertwig’s debut collection of poetry, Slow War, is at once an account of contemporary warfare and a personal journey of loss and the search for healing. It stands in the tradition of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Kevin Powers’s “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.” A century after the First World War, Hertwig presents both the personal cost of war in poems such as “Somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan” and “Food Habits of Coyotes, as Determined by Examination of Stomach Contents,” and the potential for healing in unlikely places in “A Poem Is Not Guantánamo Bay.”

This collection provides no easy answers – Hertwig looks at the war in Afghanistan with the unflinching gaze of a soldier and the sustained attention of a poet. In his accounting of warfare and its difficult aftermath on the homefront, the personal becomes political. While these poems inhabit both experimental and traditional forms, the breakdown of language channels a descent into violence and an ascent into a future that no longer feels certain, where history and trauma are forever intertwined. Hertwig reminds us that remembering war is a political act and that writing about war is a way we remember. 

Praise for Slow War

"We are occasionally lucky enough to encounter a writer we need, like Benjamin Hertwig, who offers solidarity while challenging our assumptions, who illuminates and shades our lives in surprising ways. After reading these poems I can’t imagine a world without them."
—John K. Samson, musician and editor, author of Lyrics and Poems, 1997–2012

"This hard-hitting debut collection is the record of a soldier’s heart, before, during and after war" —Toronto Star

“In his quiet way, Benjamin Hertwig shows us the terror and wonder of being alive. Slow War is a powerful exploration of violence, longing, and the before and after of ‘time and war and other old gods.’ A profound and beautiful book.” —Deborah Campbell, winner of the 2016 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for A Disappearance in Damascus

“I know of few books that deal with the experience of combat in such a humane and almost tender way. Benjamin Hertwig’s Slow War is a powerful and moving work of art.” —John Skoyles, poetry editor of Ploughshares, author of Suddenly It’s Evening

Hertwig's collection builds toward a tender reconstruction that resists being overwrought."—Domenica Martinello, Canadian Notes & Queries

"When it comes to Canadian war literature, Slow War is the new required reading"—Noah Cain, Prairie Fire Magazine