Overview

Fish Streets before Dawn brings us all the fabric of Rick Campbell's created worlds, and then he takes us further as his energy expands and contracts along newer avenues of thought and feeling. Campbell is one of his generation that took to America's roads and byways, old cars, hitchhiking, The Greyhound, and just plain walking. . . . Campbell's wanderings and questing are testimony to the core of his art: surviving, yes, but surviving as the step that allows us to pursue any small good we can bring along with us. (from the Introduction)

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9781950413744

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Reviews

"Fish Streets before Dawn investigates aging and what it means for the self and for America. With allusions to twentieth century poetry and pop music, Rick Campbell explores the nature of home as both particular places and more metaphorically-memory, people, baseball, the self. These poems remind us that telling ""slow stories about the lost / and far away"" is a means of holding it all close. They don't rage against the dying of the light, but rather they reflect it with a quiet dignity and wise depth that begged me to read them again. -Gerry LaFemina, author of After the War for Independence Early in Fish Streets before Dawn, Rick Campbell says, ""I am but a simple man,"" which is true and untrue at the same time-true because we see a life centered on smoking mullet, working on cars, walking on country roads, contemplating water. Yet there is a deeper rhythm here, an almost Japanese aesthetic that lets his images speak of the impermanence of all things and their unspeakable beauty. Finally these poems are focused on the rapture of the world. -Barbara Hamby, author of Holoholo Any compendium of [Rick] Campbell's habits of mind, in any order, show his stance and countenance in the face of a broken world, where our attentions are pulled and pushed by its debilitating trivialities and its unspeakable horrors alike. -from the Introduction by Frank X. Gaspar, author of Late Rapturous"

Author Information

Rick Campbell is a poet and essayist living on Alligator Point, Florida. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Sometimes the Light (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.). Poetry collections include: Provenance (Blue Horse Press); Gunshot, Peacock, Dog (Madville Publishing); The History of Steel (All Nations Press); Dixmont (Autumn House Press); Setting the World in Order (Texas Tech University Press); The Traveler's Companion (Black Bay Books); and A Day's Work (State Street Press). His poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Fourth River, Kestrel, Alabama Literary Review, and Prairie Schooner. He's won a Pushcart Prize and an NEA Fellowship in Poetry. He teaches in the University of Nevada-Reno's MFA program.

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