True Story - by Randy Blasing (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

True Story is Randy Blasing's tenth book of poems. He plots the true stories he tells here along the trajectory of his actual life-from his memories of growing up in the Midwest to his experience of living in New England and visiting the Southwest and the Mideast-in no-holds-barred poems bristling with particulars and steeped in emotion, where past and present meet and come alive.

For example, a starlit fall night brings to light childhood autumns that shape his life to this day; a classic-car show takes him down Memory Lane to when the heady fifties came unglued in the sixties; a graphic dream returns him to his lost first love. Or now he is a casual collector of Zuni fetishes, in which nature and the sacred intersect as art, in New Mexico; now he is the American father-of-the-groom at his son's Turkish wedding; or now he belongs to an endangered species quarantined against a viral attack. Always true to his feelings, he keeps it real, whenever and wherever.

Review Quotes

"Here is the heart as muscle and life force, as vehicle for romance, as the beating meter of each of these glorious poems."-Denise Duhamel

"James Wright famously aspired to write poetry that privileged, above all, 'the pure, clear word.' Randy Blasing seeks the same demanding goal in this fluent and moving collection." -David Wojahn