Böcker av Rick Campbell

Fish Streets before Dawn brings us all the fabric of Rick Campbell's created worlds, and then he takes us further as his energy expands and contracts along newer avenues of thought and feeling. Campbell is one of his generation that took to America's roads and byways, old cars, hitchhiking, The Greyhound, and just plain walking. . . . Campbell's wanderings and questing are testimony to the core of his art: surviving, yes, but surviving as the step that allows us to pursue any small good we can bring along with us. (from the Introduction)

A U.S. destroyer is torpedoed by an Iranian submarine and Captain Murray Wilson of the U.S.S. Michigan is flown to the Pentagon to meet with the Secretary of the Navy (SecNav). There Wilson learns that the Iranian submarine is just a cover story. One of the United States' own fully automated unmanned underwater vehicles has gone rogue, it's programing corrupted in some way. Murray is charged with hunting it down and taking it out before the virus that's infected it's operating system can infect the rest of the fleet. At the same time, the head of the SEAL detachment aboard the U.S.S Michigan is killed and Lonnie Mixell, a former U.S. operative, now assassin for hire, is responsible. And that is only the first SEAL to be hunted down and killed. Jake Harrison, fellow SEAL, discovers that these SEALs had one mission in common - they were all on the team that killed Bin Laden. Or so the world was told. As Wilson discovers that his mission is actually meant to cover up dangerous acts of corruption, even treason, Harrison discovers that the assassin is out to protect the same forces. Forces too powerful for either of them to take on alone.

Rick Campbell's latest collection 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