The Real Warnings

"Open this book up anywhere and you'll find a poem of fierce and uncompromising energy and insight, a poem that doesn't pull any punches or take any prisoners, a poem that will both stun and uplift, even as it wounds and sometimes descends into darkness.

I've never read a poet who understands more fully the brutal paradoxes of love and of loving damaged things, nor have I ever read one whose epiphanies felt truer. Even more than the real warnings, this collection represents the real thing and you'll be changed by reading it."

- Sheryl St. Germain, 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry Judge
 

"What a range of feeling Rhett Iseman Trull captures in The Real Warnings! With a dramatist's sense of story and an actor's skill in timing, she gives us everything from adolescent confusion to strung-out loneliness, from the emptiness of unrequited love to the joy of fulfillment, from the celebration of new birth to sorrow for departures. Her foreknowledge is powerfully unsettling, while her respect for the present detail is reverent: 'What I can't say, the tipped-over shopping cart outside Wal-Mart / says for me.

Here is a brilliant, caring, and telling new voice. They don't come all that often and never better than this one."

- Fred Chappell

Awards: The Real Warnings is the winner of the 2010 Brockman Campbell Award from the NC Poetry Society and the 2010 Oscar Arnold Young Award from the NC Poetry Council, both given for the best book of poetry by a NC poet published the previous year. It is also the winner of the 2010 Devil's Kitchen Reading Award, given for the best book of poetry published the previous year.

The Real Warnings is currently available through Anhinga Press, Amazon.com, or any bookseller. Paperback - $15.00 - ISBN 978-1-934695-11-1. Published October 2009

Poems from The Real Warnings

"The Real Warnings Are Always Too Late"  (Explorations)
"Instructions on How to Leave Me"  (The Greensboro Review)
"The Streets of My Heart"  (The American Poetry Journal)
"Naming the Baby for Mark and Terra"  (Waccamaw)