Additional information
by Diane Kistner (Editor), Robert Cooperman (Author)
DRAFT BOARD BLUES is more than the story of a draft dodger. It's about a war and a generation's response to our debacle in Vietnam. As with all wars, old men declared war and then shoved young men into harm's way. And as always, it was mostly the poor and the most desperate who fought the war. The losses were heavy on our side, but for the Vietnamese, they were staggering, unthinkable. Cooperman's narrator at first passively acquiesces to serving and probably dying in that conflagration. But when he gets a brief glimpse that there are other possibilities, he decides he'd rather die than have the army or the Viet Cong kill him. With wit, outrage, irony, and "a touch of the blues," DRAFT BOARD BLUES chronicles that struggle. To read it is to be thrown back into a tumultuous time, a time not so different from our own.
Author Biography
Robert Cooperman is a graduate of the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Books) won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry in 2000. The Widow's Burden (Western Reflections Books) was runner-up for the WILLA Awards from Women Writing the West. Cooperman's latest collection is Just Drive (Brick Road Poetry Press). My Shtetl won the Logan House Award in 2012. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, Mississippi Review, and North American Review. Cooperman lives in Denver with his wife Beth.
