Gunshot, Peacock, Dog
978-1-948692-04-5 paper 15.95
978-1-948692-05-2 ebook 9.99
6×9, 80 pp.
Poetry
September 2018
Rick Campbell’s latest collection, Gunshot, Peacock, Dog, reads like an extended elegy for the poet himself, for his lost loved ones, and for the changes in the wider world. In this way, it is reminiscent of Hardy. This is the work of a man wise in the ways of the world and not afraid to be what we all are: flawed. His voice is personal and vulnerable . . . The book consists of very detailed and compressed poems, both focused on the natural world and on an inner landscape described with a consistent tone and voice throughout.
—George Drew, author of Fancy’s Orphan, Pastoral Habits, and Down and Dirty
These poems are crafted from the raw material of experience, from a life lived deeply and without varnish, and each poem sparks and flares with hard-earned wisdom.
—Brian Turner, author of Here Bullet, Phantom Noise, and My Life as a Foreign Country, a Memoir
Rick Campbell has published five previous collections of poetry and numerous poems and essays. He teaches in the Sierra Nevada College Low Residency MFA Program and at Florida A&M University. He lives on Alligator Point in Florida’s Panhandle.
Here is one of our favorite poems from the collection:
The Crying Baby Flight
We are landing in the night
and the lights make our town a city,
the way one light in the dark
seems like home, seems safe.
The babies were brown and cried
loud in the native tongue of babies,
not the one their father used when he said
what no doubt meant be quiet little one
or shut the fuck up (and who among us
would know, though many of us were
thinking it). Then the baby said
I have to pee pee. I have to pee pee.
And we wanted to say Jesus man,
let the kid pee, but we were landing
and none of us could move and I
imagined a river of pee moving under
my seat, soaking my computer bag,
gliding toward the pilot’s locked door.
Threat code yellow. Threat code warm.
I raised my feet; the baby was quiet,
his father too.
Here is a great conversation between Bob Kunzinger (A Third Place: Notes in Nature) and Rick Campbell: “Two Writers at Alligator Point”