Fish Streets before Dawn investigates aging and what it means for the self and for America. With allusions to twentieth century poetry and pop music, Rick Campbell explores the nature of home as both particular places and more metaphorically—memory, people, baseball, the self. These poems remind us that telling “slow stories about the lost / and far away” is a means of holding it all close. They don’t rage against the dying of the light, but rather they reflect it with a quiet dignity and wise depth that begged me to read them again.

—Gerry LaFemina, author of After the War for Independence

Early in Fish Streets before Dawn, Rick Campbell says, “I am but a simple man,” which is true and untrue at the same time—true because we see a life centered on smoking mullet, working on cars, walking on country roads, contemplating water. Yet there is a deeper rhythm here, an almost Japanese aesthetic that lets his images speak of the impermanence of all things and their unspeakable beauty. Finally these poems are focused on the rapture of the world.

—Barbara Hamby, author of Holoholo

Any compendium of [Rick] Campbell’s habits of mind, in any order, show his stance and countenance in the face of a broken world, where our attentions are pulled and pushed by its debilitating trivialities and its unspeakable horrors alike.

—from the Introduction by Frank X. Gaspar, author of Late Rapturous