Have You Landed?

“Equal parts tender and unblinking, Have You Landed? is a generous and deeply immersive portrait of the most intimate proximities to military life. More than that, though, it’s a record of the profound power, complexity, and dignity inherent in an individual life, and of the constellation of ways we are – all of us – part of greater wholes. Lyric, loving, restrained, and searching, these essays will echo in my head for a long time to come.“—Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I’ve Taken My Body: Essays

“Immersive, intimate, and reminiscent of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, Have You Landed? has the quality of a song performed in moving harmony. Each voice is its own, but, together, they create a sound that is at once stoic, brave, and tender. For me, this collection did what the best books do: It reminded me that I am never alone.“—Simone Gorrindo, author of The Wives: A Memoir

“In Have You Landed? Emma Comery rewrites and broadens what we know of military living. The context here – the quiet details of a life inside the imperative distance – shine a light on what love looks like to servicemen and civilians caring for country and home. After years interviewing those enlisted and those military-adjacent—spouses, lovers, widows, exes, those willing and honest enough to open the door to their distinct reality – Comery reframes their experiences by crafting nuanced portraits of deployment, foreign emergencies, PTSD, living within, and living without. There’s no hiding what’s hardest here: infertility, fraught faith, child rearing, relocation, death, devastation, war. Perhaps the figures depicted made time and space for inquiry because they grasped that someone in the future would desperately need a portrait of what they’d already survived, and despite the distance and difficulty, learn how they might thrive. To be a military partner is to know that the calling away can happen with no warning and all must endure despite this. The hope is that everyone caught in the fray comes out stronger, closer, whole. Have You Landed? is here to remind us all that ‘sometimes the leaving feels like falling apart, and sometimes it feels like falling in love.’“—Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up

Emma Comery is a writer and the assistant director of communications for one of the largest veteran services organizations in Texas. Her work has appeared in The Bend Magazine, Military Families Magazine, Reserve and National Guard Magazine, Arts and Letters Journal, Line of Advance, and Poets.org.

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