In the Heart of America

Appalachian-born Craver and Palestinian-American Remzi bond in a way characteristic of soldiers, but their relationship seamlessly blends into intimacy and homoeroticism, without ever becoming explicitly sexual, in Naomi Wallace's exploration of the body as means for love and a tool of war.

"IN THE HEART OF AMERICA is a pretty startling piece of writing. It has the driving political anger and entwining of the personal and political that marked some of the best British writing of the early seventies, the vigor and mystical overtones of raw Sam Shepard, and the grace and sensuality of a poet... The landscape here is the barren, burned-out emptiness of history's war zones, and the talk is relentlessly of death and destruction. But there is also love." Lyn Gardner, The Guardian (London)