Jeff delivers the mail. Every day, up and down the streets of Des Moines, he carries the messages people send each other—the bills and the junk, the love letters and the eviction notices, the chain letters and the secret correspondences of paranoid militias. It is the year 2025, and America is coming apart at the seams. Dispatches from an American Battlefield is a novel of walking and witnessing—a letter carrier's field notes from the front lines of a collapsing republic. Part diary, part prose poem, part prophetic rant, it moves between the mundane and the apocalyptic with the same steady stride: Dogs that bark and don’t bite. Neighbors who do. A fiancée in chronic pain. A best friend’s dissolving marriage. Militia radio. School shootings. A wedding interrupted by gunfire . . . . This is a book about what it costs to pay attention—to the world as it is, and to the world as it ought to be. Written fast and hot, in real time, between May and October of 2025, Dispatches asks the question that won't go away: How do you keep delivering the message when the whole system is on fire?
