3.5 stars. i wish I understood this book more than I do, because I really like nick flynn. it just seems like there's a lot going on in the book that isn't grounded, so it's a bit hard to decipher.

There were poems I liked.ImaginationJesus KnewWaterForetting SomethingPulse (Hidden Bird)I thought that "Fire" & "Air" would be more powerful if they were heard as opposed to being silently read. I could picture a performance art piece with many voices reciting these lines at once.If it wasn't for the fact that the actual redacted testimonies of Abu Ghraib detanees wasn't included in the notes section I would not understand what "Seven Testimonies" were about. The testimonies themselves held muc...

Not my favorite Flynn but still worthy of five yellow stars

I loved the cover of this book. The poems themselves, less so.

Some good stuff here - I've never read Flynn; always meant to check out his memoirs, but started here. Good place to start it turns out...

Nick Flynn’s awkward and mercifully brief new foray into poetry, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, worried me from the start. The second poem, “fire”, begins, “more the idea of the flame than the flame / as in: the flame / of the rose petal, the flame of the thorn / the sun is a flame” and proceeds in that manner for a dozen more pages. Not content only to copy Gertrude Stein’s nonsense, Flynn also creates an unflattering homage to Galway Kinnell’s masterful “The Dead Shall be Raised Incorru...

Takes on a whole new meaning if you read all reference to Captain or capt'n as referring to Captain Crunch.

I have read two of Nick's memoirs (THE TICKING... and ANOTHER SHIT NIGHT...) and the poetry collection I WILL DESTROY YOU all of which I enjoyed immensely. This one is not at all enjoyable. I don't think that it's just not my taste, I think it's actually not good writing. His poems in response to testimonials from abused detainees at Abu Ghraib are terrible in comparison to the actual stories that were told. Was there a point to writing minimalist poetry about each one and losing all the powerfu...

The poem Jesus Knew is my favorite. It breaks my heart (open) every time I read it. The thing is, the breaking is over something different with each reading. How does that happen? How does he manage that? The words on the page remain the same, obediently anchored to their assigned seats. And yet, not. Because every time I visit this poem the words somehow morph and shift, lift off the stage of ivory paper, quick-change their costumes and voices, dance and contort like some kind of Cirque du Sole...

Like watching clips of gross and tragic YouTube videos while intoxicated, this collection of poems deals with difficult themes and is granted the urgency they deserve.

The value of any type of literature is purely subjective, and poetry illustrates that principle most of all. I don't know exactly what it is that I like about Nick Flynn's prose, but it makes me feel, something , and it is clear that he writes from a place of pain and perspective, and that the emotionality in his work always rings true.

There are maybe ten really strong poems in this book. The rest are fragments, riffs and echoes around the central topic of torture, specifically the U.S. torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib. I commend Flynn for taking on this timely, difficult project, and I was intrigued by Flynn's lyric poetic approach to it, but ultimately, this collection doesn't do it justice. In fact, the playful musicality, elliptical rhetoric and dense repetition of these poems seem at times to undercut or diffuse the bru...

It's misleading that I have this in the school shelf bc the reality is I read a few bits of it for school like 5 months ago but u know what! I'm catching up on reading now since I got nothing else to do!!

after spending time in turkey interviewing former abu ghraib detainees, it is clear the experiences there have had a profound and lasting effect not only on nick flynn himself but also upon his writing. as was the case in his most recent memoir, the ticking is the bomb, his new collection of poetry, the captain asks for a show of hands, is predominantly informed by the subject of torture. flynn's poems, both engrossing and affecting, are possessed by a determined candor. a rhythmic devotion to t...

Nick Flynn is now one more author I used to enjoy.I could say my malaise began with 2002’s Blind Huber, where the only bad poems were the ones about bees (and they were all about bees), but with enjoying his first poetry collection, Some Ether, so much, and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City still being the best memoir I ever read, I merely considered it a miss in the middle. Now that his 2010 memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, and this latest poetry collection, The Captain Asks for a Show of Han...

A series of poems by Nick Flynn, used as satire/political poetry against the use and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib. I want to like this more than it should. The writing is just.... not good... not my style... hard to follow.. uninteresting... just a lot of things wrong with it. Granted, I'm not the most poetic and understanding of poetry person there is.... but still.A lot of this is just bad, and the end notes don't inspire much other than the sympathy for the detainees. The end notes actual...

Nick Flynn's creative illustration may leave you feeling a little reluctant to persist on. It's not until the end in which you find the "Some Notes", where you begin to connect the dots. So you reread; although I reread reluctantly. The sparse couplet-esque format and sea-massive spacious line break made me feel a little empty. I didn't think it was captivating, as I assume it wasn't meant to captivate because the writing wasn't captivating. Without the Notes section in the book, I would be lost...

As I read The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn, the word esoteric kept rising to the surface of my thoughts. Flynn's poems have a feel of peeking inside a world I'm unfamiliar with, maybe even a world I don't want to see but need to. There were moments I felt like the experiences Flynn shared in these poems lived outside a reality I could understand yet I felt compelled to keep reading, to explore the words, to see where each poem was going. The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands lef...

Unfortunately, I'll remember this book most by the seven, full testimonies in the notes section and how much more affecting they were than the "redacted" versions in the main body text.I liked the elemental poems ("earth," "fire," "water," "air") more upon rereading. Interesting ideas in the book, with something to be desired in the execution.