" A savage book, terrifyingly illustrated by Leon Golub." --John Engels Author of Selected Poems
Published in 1993 by Innerer Klang Press of Boston, Soldiers of Fortune contains two long political poems, "The White Shark: Notes for a History" and "Soldiers of Fortune." The book was a collaboration between Kirtland Snyder and the American painter/activist Leon Golub, who created computer-generated images for the book.
"Soldiers of Fortune" (the poem) was written in the 1980s in opposition to Reagan Administration foreign policy in Central America, specifically the Contra war in Nicaragua. The poem was as much a response to Leon Golub's "Mercenaries & Interrogations" paintings of that time as it was to historical events of the period.
First published in 1989 in notus new writing, "Soldiers of Fortune" attracted the interest and admiration of Leon Golub, who wrote in a letter to Snyder, "Your evoking of my work is terse, direct, unrelenting--that is, you're not summarizing [the paintings] so much as making a parallel experience."
Written in the early 1970s, "The White Shark: Notes for a History" addresses the assassinations, civil strife, and war in Vietnam and delineates a mythos of violence that informed the 1960s. The poem was first published in The Ardis Anthology of New American Poetry in 1977.
