In her most recent book of poems, Civilians (LSU Press 2025), Jehanne Dubrow draws inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphosis to record a sailor’s retirement from active duty military service and explore the resulting changes that are suddenly beset upon him and his wife. Civilians is Dubrow’s third book in a trilogy that considers the contemporary state of the U.S. military from the perspective of a military spouse. In those other two books—Stateside and Dots & Dashes—Dubrow’s formal prowess organizes a simmering longing for the beloved through a dynamic time of 21st-century forever wars.
A daughter of U.S. diplomats who spent much of her childhood in former Iron Curtain countries, Dubrow is an insider—a military spouse and U.S. citizen—who often brings an outsider’s ironic view to American war writing. In Civilians, she does the same, using crisply formalist sensibilities to document, explore, and question the lasting marks military service can leave. Civilians goes even further, however, by inquiring into the process of retiring from military service and investigating how it changes both parties in a long marriage. “Sometimes a hero dies / and later is burned—his ashes // barely fill a modest urn,” she writes. “More often the soldier / simply stops being one.”
Throughout Civilians, Dubrow has a habit of cleverly personifying war, which lends a pulsing clarity that counters otherwise sanitary media representations of military service. In these poems, war lives and breathes. It’s characterized less by abstract headlines about defense budgets, failed missions, or antiseptic lists of casualties and more by accumulated pounds of flesh. In “What Do You Give the War that Has Everything,” she references traditional wedding anniversary gifts—from paper to diamonds—to capture war’s unraveling insatiability for violence, blood, and power. In a series of poems all titled “Civilian,” she shows the cost of war to not only its soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, but also to the families they come home to. Here, the beloved transforms into a literal war, and as a result, dread multiplies and dominates the most private of domestic spaces: “I bring the war into my bed each night,” she writes. “I barely move. Beneath the trembling light, / I am a target in the line of sight.”
One unique tension that can arise for military marriages is when the active duty member and spouse fail to see eye-to-eye about the merits of service to an empire that has often and continues to wreak havoc on foreign soils. This is something that other military spouse poets have questioned, including Abby E. Murray in her recent book of poems Recovery Commands, and Dubrow is concerned with it as well, writing “. . . Often, we agree / on nothing but the bedroom, / our zone of safe passage.” She explores both the costs of war—its legacies of violence and terror—as well as its erotic possibilities, which are woven into the poetry of human drama since Paris stole Helen from the king of Sparta, launching a thousand ships toward the shores of Troy.
Civilians is as often a book about long-term coupledom as it is war, however, and as a result, Dubrow faithfully maps the intricacies of a lengthy marriage. In doing so, she shows how couples change each other in ways that can be sometimes hurtful. “Hyacinthus” asks whether these small slights and larger betrayals can be made into a sum bigger than their parts—or perhaps even beautiful: “And couldn’t I make a cluster of blossoms / from whatever hurt we left on one another?” Along with confronting the thornier aspects of long love, Dubrow is not afraid to explore the question of whether loving a military service member means being complicit in acts of violence. In “Apologia,” she directly confronts the contradiction of being repelled by “the engines / of invasion” and yet remaining in love with a man whose livelihood is in service to war, issuing a self-indictment with the line “I admit the heart refuses to apologize.”
The emotional—and literal—center of Civilians is a stunning long poem titled “Metamorphosis” that uses myth and legend to trace the change the beloved makes upon retiring from the U.S. Navy. By evoking Ovid, as well as Greek myths and legends from Medusa to the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Dubrow maps the transformation of the beloved from weapon of the state to a relatively defanged civilian marked by long service to wars and the permanent damage they can entail. As part of this transformation, the former sailor is made both precious and dangerous to the speaker, who feels as though her beloved has become as slippery and strange as Orpheus’s Eurydice: “So too with my husband / I’m listening for his footfalls / behind me in the fog. // If I turn to see him following, // he’s already leaving / in a slender twist of smoke.” What Dubrow channels, here, is the difficulty—the near impossibility—of ever truly knowing one’s beloved. Even through the joy and travails of a long-term marriage, knowing the other becomes as amorphous and gauzy as mist.
Throughout Civilians, Dubrow evokes both the tension between the marriage of a civilian to an active duty service member, as well as the tension inherent in the transition the active duty service member must make—in retirement—to becoming a civilian again. The metamorphosis the marriage must also undergo is akin to an unraveling, as if back to a simpler time, unimpeded and uninterrupted by permanent changes of station, deployments, and training exercises. Yet Dubrow acknowledges that this kind of marriage cannot help but be defined by—often scarred by—wartime service, which leaves an imprint of trauma, absence, longing, and sometimes even moral injury. Among the questions she raises are provocations such as how does one ethically marry into the military? Is that even possible? How does one support a spouse who retires from military service? Who are these two people to each other at the end of a literally epic journey? Dubrow makes these inquiries—and more—with poems that are as tight, exacting, and purposeful as the mechanisms on a warship.