Carry You

"Fiction, done right, can do the important job of making real the vague and overwhelming—a task successfully achieved by Glori Simmons in Carry You. A detailed and complex portrait of the war on both sides, Carry You is an important reminder of the terrible ways that war can—and does—go wrong." —Colorado Review

"The tension is almost never released in Carry You, with violence and uncertainty simmering on every page. Characters struggle with whom to trust, whom to blame, and often find death staring them in the face. The collection itself is a metaphor for war and how there is never one side, but multiple, if not hundreds of thousands, of perspectives. In this way, Carry You situates itself in a long tradition of literature about war—from Homer’s Iliad to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, to, more recently, books like Phil Klay’s Redeployment and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. In Carry You, readers find not good guys and bad guys, but complex characters striving within war’s gray ambiguity." —Sinkhole Magazine

"Carry You is an intense read, a linked collection of finely intertwined stories expertly dealing with the intricate nature of blame, complicity, duty, and war. These stories are masterful without being heavy-handed. Each story in this collection is a satisfaction." —Amina Gautier

"In her deeply empathetic new collection, Carry You, Glori Simmons seamlessly transports us between the disparate landscapes of Iraq and America’s Pacific Coast. Along the way, we learn that people are more similar than different, humanity linked by the grace of the human heart. There is no more important lesson in our tumultuous times. Carry You proves redemption knows no boundaries." —Quan Barry

"Carry You is a gorgeous, moving investigation into violence and the way that it warps us. From Iraqi to American, from soldier to museum conservator, Simmons’s characters evoke the gravity of war and its inevitable breaking of the ties we hold most dear: family, friends, country—even the tie between self and basic decency. Carry You is void of sloganeering, void of easy answers, but clear-eyed in its evocation of a war in which there are no winners."  —Scott Hutchins