pGerry McFarland's collection of nineteen intimate poems lyrically reflect on his years as a young Navy Gunner on board the USS King at the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam war. These poems illustrate Gunner's internal battle to adjust to not only a foreign country, but the incongruities of war, his longing for love and home, as well as the new and sometimes brutal realities and relationships that will echo into his future. We see Gunner play out a balancing act between reluctant sailor, manhood and human being.ppbrppThe sea is beautiful and merciless, it can kill you. In emGunnerem this is what Gerry McFarland makes me experience what it feels like being in a diminishing space somewhere between both curving dark ends of the world, where existence on a naval ship is a continual cycle of the mundane broken by flashes, intense moments, when life-saving decisions are made. McFarland intimately knows deployment he knows that caring for a fifty-caliber machine gun is a maintenance ritual w