In a recent essay, the poet Solmaz Sharif lamented that so few contemporary American poets write about American wars. The reluctance to touch the topic, she thought, often came from a well-meaning humility: Unless the author has a personal experience with war, they think they can’t write it. Yet this demurral, Sharif wrote, paradoxically “drops the burden of actual critique on the survivors themselves,” or else leaves it “to vets and embedded journalists who invade and then get to write about their invading, doubling their power.”

The Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie perceived the same