True Story

True Story is Randy Blasing's tenth book of poems. He plots the true stories he tells here along the trajectory of his actual life-from his memories of growing up in the Midwest to his experience of living in New England and visiting the Southwest and the Mideast-in no-holds-barred poems bristling with particulars and steeped in emotion, where past and present meet and come alive.

For example, a starlit fall night brings to light childhood autumns that shape his life to this day; a classic-car show takes him down Memory Lane to when the heady fifties came unglued in the sixties; a graphic dream returns him to his lost first love. Or now he is a casual collector of Zuni fetishes, in which nature and the sacred intersect as art, in New Mexico; now he is the American father-of-the-groom at his son's Turkish wedding; or now he belongs to an endangered species quarantined against a viral attack. Always true to his feelings, he keeps it real, whenever and wherever.

Born in Minneapolis and educated at Carleton College and the University of Chicago, Randy Blasing is also the co-translator, from the Turkish, of nine books of Nazim Hikmet's poetry. He has been awarded fellowships by the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work has been widely anthologized, most recently in The POETRY Anthology (1912-2002), and Poetry Daily Essentials (2007). For fifty years he taught English at William & Mary, Pomona College, and the Community College of Rhode Island. He lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island in Lincoln.