Soldiers return from war with the distinct feeling that their experiences have sliced them away from their lives, that they have been haphazardly pasted back after war, expected by others and by themselves to fit back in. Instead of sensing the relief of homecoming, they encounter the jagged edges of their incompatibility with who they were. Writing about this sense of ‘radical discontinuity’ felt by those who survived World War I, Eric J. Leed describes soldiers as ‘troubled by the sense of having lived two lives and of being unable to resolve the contradictions between them’. This ill-fitting, disjointed experience is exacerbated by the fact that, in many cases, returning soldiers, at least those who do not bear physical scars, ‘look the same’ and are thus expected to reintegrate quickly, a fact that produces a profound frustration – one that brings with it, moreover, an urgent need to find a way of addressing and giving voice to that incompatibility. It is precisely that effort to seek new words for a new strange life that I will refer to as the work of the prosthesis, the laborious process of building a new way of speaking out of the rubble of post-war language. Soldiers seek out a mode of communication from the remains of a language they had once known and used and yet that seems, in the wake of war, like a broken and inadequate tool. Amid the struggle to reinitiate the work of meaning, this new form of communication takes, at times, the shape of what is commonly thought of as literary or poetic language.