The Shape of Our Faces No Longer Matters is a collection of poems by Gerardo Mena that explores his time in the Iraqi war, as a highly decorated marine medical officer. The poems also explore his life back home after the end of his militant service. The collection contains 58 poems that are systematically divided into three sections. These sections are divided based on his time at war, casualties of war, and aftereffects of war respectively. Mena utilizes diverse types of poetic tools such as freestyling, haiku, script, and military medical slip format to get his ideas across successfully.
The author is exceptional at describing and reporting on his emotions and experiences. The short nature of the poems gives it a brief moment of decisive poems that are straight to the point without room for lingering. By using factual events as his source of inspiration, it gives the narrative a real-life touch that greatly resonates to anyone interested in understanding the effects of war.
The narratives are ethereal and surreal which makes this collection a powerful outing for the poet. His dreamy and ambitious search for new metaphors is exhilarating, to say the least. While Mena’s poems are readily accessible and clear about what they are talking about, the poems are still rooted in the great mystery that makes this collection a thrill.
The speaker of these poems feels drowned by war. He is the hero, villain, dead, alive, and the essence of war itself. He takes you on a roller-coaster of dealing with insurgents in a place where any moment could very well be your last. While in service, Mena showed the highest order of bravery through his actions of Valor. Through this collection, he breaks the mold of what bravery is by opening up and offering a glimpse of the wounds that war brings even to the best of us.
