"A Shadow on Our Hearts: Soldier-Poetry, Morality, and the American War in Vietnam is an ambitious book, which bridges three interrelated academic disciplines and attempts to fill gaps in each . . . Writing as a historian, Gilbert centers soldier and veteran poetry not only as literary texts, but as a critical part of the historical record of the war."—Journal of Veterans Studies
"A Shadow on Our Hearts is an exceedingly well researched and well written book that has been needed for decades: a thorough investigation into the morality of the war as seen and experienced and expressed by American combat participants."—Vince Gotera, author of Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans
"I highly recommend A Shadow on Our Hearts to all who have a serious interest in learning more about the Vietnam War and about the people who went off to that war, not knowing what to expect, but dealing with it when they got there the best they could."—The VVA Veteran
"This is the real deal—the big book on soldier-poetry of the Vietnam War that we have waited a half a century to get written."—Philip Beidler, author of American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam and Re-writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation
"Gilbert uses the poets' voices to capture the horrors of war with such clarity and honesty that the effect is sobering. We feel the war in ways that standard historical narratives cannot quite capture, while still receiving thoughtful historical analysis from Gilbert . . . [T]his book will prove useful to scholars of the Vietnam conflict and of American history but also to those in other humanities disciplines such as literature, philosophy, and psychology."—Journal of American Culture
"Gilbert asserts that his study is not meant to be taken as a literary analysis; the many poets and poems that he reads . . . illuminate intersecting moral and historical questions. For Gilbert, this body of poetry is an overlooked reservoir of knowledge bearing witness to the experience of US soldiers in Vietnam."—American Literary History
"Winnowing the poetic immensity to twenty-ï¬ve poets listed in an appendix, Gilbert reads the poems he has selected in order to show how the American war in Vietnam was not only a defeat for the United States but 'a moral failure.'"—American Literature