Truth and Other Lies

These fierce poems bleed love and loss, knotted with a personal reckoning of a "Vietnam of the soul" shared with a vanished husband whom neither divorce nor death can finally erase. Pris Campbell cuts herself to the quick and keeps going. Her wounds become a blessing in art, a gift to us all.- Jeff Weddle, winner of the Eudora Welty PrizeIn this poignant collection, Pris Campbell tells us the story of how she fell in love, waited for him while he trained as a naval officer at OCS, got married in the romantically magical land of Hawaii, and then divorced all the while the Vietnam War was ripping the soul of America in two. Campbell masterfully casts a spell over us as she relives their past and how the present is haunted by the hopes and dreams of her first marriage. History, particularly the events on the fringes and margins of a horrific war, walks side by side with their fated romance, told by an exemplary humane narrator.

"- Michael Parker, author of Divining the Spirits in the House of the Hush and Hush.