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 Prize

In 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.

Grief takes on many faces, shifts hot and cold, changes through the omnivorous jaws of time. In Pris Campbell's most recent book, Truth and Other Lies, we learn how a war can consume not only its soldiers, but also those who loved them. Her vivid and honest poems put architecture to the thinning walls of angst and PTSD. In full color, set in the trauma of the 1960's anti-war movement, we find a collection of poems that draws us toward empathy and compassion, finding in "Fourteen Months," an uncommon truth: "He's dead two years and a half now... poems spill out like the turning tide he rode on then and ride again now, touching me occasionally within our shared Vietnam of the soul." This is narrative poetry at a visceral level, provocative, naked, and essential.

- Edward Nudelman, author of Thin Places.