B O O K S

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03/2001. xx, 83 pages.
0896724476
978-0-89672-447-1

Setting the World in Order

By Rick Campbell
Foreword by Robert A. Fink

Rick Campbell’s journey from the banks of the Ohio to the beaches of Florida is a rhapsody, and the music he makes in ordering his world takes us with him, to the headwaters of a new river.

Rick Campbell’s poems leave some sweet dirt under your fingernails— proof of hard, honest work when the longing of small-town America is not enough. Setting the World in Order eloquently plots our geographically impossible trajectories. On the way, Campbell can lay down a narrative as spacious as the range of a blues harmonica, every gritty riff dissolving into compassion.—Dionisio D. Martínez

Rick Campbell’s poems move with grace and muscle and music from the Catholic working class of his youth, its factories and foundries, along the rivers of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, and through the lives of the flesh-and-blood characters of contemporary America. Part prayer, part song, part gritty story, they always dance with meaning and significance; they always wholly embrace the idea of individual presence in a terrible, beautiful world.—Frank X. Gaspar

From Harmonica Lesson

Go with the rhythm
till you can’t get off the track.
Like this. Tight-belly staccato,
hands cutting and freeing the air,
one hard-held bottom line. Play between
trains. Keep the wheels in mind.
Catch the next one and play all night.
In the morning try the whistle. You’ve earned it.
It should sound like Kansas.

Setting the World in Order is the tenth winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry, selected by Robert Fink of Hardin-Simmons University, editor of the Walt McDonald First-Book Series.