Jinwar and Other Stories

Alex Poppe is the author of three other works of fiction: Duende (2022), Moxie (2019), and Girl, World (2017). Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. Her short fiction has been a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest, a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and commended for the Baker Prize among others. Her non-fiction was named a Best of the Net nominee (2016), a finalist for Hot Metal Bridge’s Social Justice Writing contest and has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, the Laurel Review, Bust, Medium’s The Startup, and Bella Caledonia among others. She is a staff writer at Preemptive Love and has completed her third and fourth books of fiction with support from Can Serrat International Art Residency and Duplo-Linea De Costa Artist-in-Residency programs. She was thrilled to be an artist- in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in spring 2021. When she is not being thrown from the back of food aid trucks or dining with pistol-packing Kurdish hit men, she writes.

Poppe’s Jinwar and Other Stories is populated by expats and ex-marines, teenage seekers, suffering mothers, and women on the margins, a fearless-yet-wounded cast of heroines who roam in order to reassemble their lives. Poppe takes the reader through the gritty paces of service jobs, hospital procedures and embed missions with stunning, gruesome detail. Visceral and propulsive, JINWAR is alive with the aftermath of war, the physical imperatives of pain and need, all while illuminating the specialized tragedy of cultures embroiled in sexist ideology and overt violence. In irreverent and cutting prose, Poppe taps into the absurd hypocrisy of unfit men in power, and questions, ultimately, what it means to care and be cared for in a world that aims to rip you apart. Poppe’s voice is an antidote. This is one hyper-astute, deadly funny, entirely consequential collection. —Kate Wisel, Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, 2019 Winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize

• Jinwar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Road Trip in War Time. . . . . . . . . 53V. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75Kurdistan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95Mosul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117Ras al-Amud. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127