The Real Warnings [Paperback]

Rhett Iseman Trull (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2009

Selected by Sheryl St. Germain, this book is the winner of the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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

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

About the Author

Rhett Iseman Trull's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2008, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other publications. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A from University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she was a Randall Jarrell fellow. She and her husband publish Cave Wall in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Product Details

• Paperback: 94 pages
• Publisher: Anhinga Press; 1st edition (August 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934695114
• ISBN-13: 978-1934695111
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #314,049 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of "The Real Warnings, August 17, 2010

By 

Scott Owens "Scott Owens" (Hickory, NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Real Warnings (Paperback)

Review
The Real Warnings, by Rhett Iseman Trull
Anhinga Press, 2008, 84 pages, $15
ISBN 9781934695111

I want Rhett Iseman Trull's book of poems The Real Warnings to have the subtitle "Taking Chances Because What Else Is There" because that is the message of these poems. Presented as one part apology, one part tribute to love and parenting, and all parts acknowledgement of the difficulty of choosing to take risks and the impossibility of choosing not to, The Real Warnings provides vital testimony to the importance of fortitude, persistence, and faith in humanity and oneself.

The opening poem (one of the best) of the collection presents this perspective summarily. The speaker "warns" her parents, "You will burn yourselves on me," and admonishes "Forget about sleeping / I'll dominate the prayers you keep sending up . . . . / For every greeting card poem, I will write four / to hurt you. Some will be true." But she advises prophetically, "You will take one look at that new life screaming / into the world, and open your arms." As a new parent, myself, I have no difficulty identifying with this course of emotions.

"The Last Good Dream" presents another image of our willingness to take risks, this time in regards to love,
. . . we give
with unthinned hearts, little knowing
how even if banked by the best words

and buoyed by honesty, love can fail.
Or maybe we do know
and unharbor ourselves anyway.
And "Introducing My Brother in the Role of Clark Kent" puts a more specific face on what we're willing to do for love and how even as we recognize the cost it has exacted from us, we know we would do it again: "he's calculated that he's spent / seventy-one-point-two percent of the last three years in her / presence, mostly happy, unwilling to trade a day of it." One poem after another provides such portraits of persistence despite the warnings and even knowledge of the dangers involved: "The Boy in the Full-Length Women's Fur Coat" "thinks of her, // the girl he keeps loving / and losing;" the speaker in "Everything from That Point On" says, "I loved you most in that moment, knowing // even as I slipped my arm up the back of your shirt, hooking us // together, that you were about to cut me loose;" and "Hanna" in "Study of Motion" says, "Pursue Joy Now" and moves "to San Francisco" to "do what she loves."

No naïve romantic, however, the speaker of these poems knows that in pursuit of joy there will be frustration, failure, even desperation, and she knows the appeal of that desperation, that "what feels like the end is the end / only if you pull the trigger" ("The Ice Is Our Only Light"). She knows that along the way the frequently unsatisfying nature of life will lead us to almost unimaginable acts to feel again just the possibility of joy, as in "The House of Pain" where she remarks, "As you leave, what begins to haunt you / is not the blisters that bangle your wrist like opals. / It is not the awful things he did to you / but the yes that you roared as you let him." Thus, these usually hopeful poems are at times painful, at times heartwrenchingly so, as in the best of them all, "The End of the Hour:"
. . . The hour's over.
Today's final question: not why
the scars but where? Where else
did you do that?
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . I
start to remove my blouse, to offer
a look at the marks I scored
that no one's ever seen. For a moment
I feel human, all masks put away. I will show
her all of it, ugliness I've covered until now, but
That's enough, she scolds, jotting a furious
phrase in her notes before opening the cabinet
with her heel and storing, again, my file.
. . . . . . . . . .
Don't ask, I think, if you don't want to know.
but I say, I'm sorry, sorry familiar
as breath, Sorry, sent out the door half-
unbuttoned.

But what matters most to the anti-nihilist, the existentialist who speaks these poems is the refusal to give up. So, in "Counting Miracles" we hear from a mental hospital resident:
We've learned a thing or two
about miracles for the common man,
. . . a nest of robins about to hatch;
fast cars on the highway, going somewhere;
in the sky, webs of lightning . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
The stars know the danger
of even a bingo-paced Wednesday and light
themselves every night in celebration
of the simple fact of our survival.
And in "The Night before Depakote," we're told simply, "It's enough that we live." And in "Last Word," we hear perhaps most clearly from the poet herself the proclamation, "I don't really want to be a concrete / signature. I want to grow old choosing ink over blood / with which, on the flank of the world, I'll set my brand." And, then, since the "last word" is really just the last word in this book-length struggle for hope, we read in the final three poems of the rewards for this victory over despair: "The streets of my heart while sun-licked, well-trafficked, amazed, / hosted a previous traveler or two, but none until you / paused to point out beauty I missed" ("The Streets of My Heart"); "Jeff and I, for the better / part of a year, have been trying to start / a life inside me" ("Sonogram on the Way to Earth"); and "Maybe // we'll bring into this world five children and ruin / every one" ("Heart by Heart the House"). Such hopeful planning should be the final breath of every difficult day.

5.0 out of 5 stars Made me throw away my pen, March 30, 2011

By 

John G. Hartness "Buy my books!" (Charlotte, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Real Warnings (Paperback)

Rhett Iseman Trull's The Real Warnings is one of the best books I've ever read. Note that I didn't say "poetry book." It's good enough to transcend genre. Sometimes you come across a book that is so good in so many directions that it makes you want to break all the writing implements in your house, and this book was like that for me. For a solid month after reading this book, anything I wanted to write, I felt like she had already written it better. I finally gave up and switched to fiction. These are approachable poems, everyman poems, the kind of poems that people who don't like poetry but like Dylan and Springsteen would enjoy. Trull opens her heart and pours her soul out over every page, and the work that flows out is truly amazing. And it's even better read live than on the page. I don't get the "Amazon Verified Purchase" seal because I bought my copy at a live reading, and I actually kinda feel bad for people who can't get to a reading of her work, because watching her read live really brings the book to life in a very special way.

Quit reading my drivel and buy the book already!

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These are the best poems I have ever read. Ever., December 4, 2010

By 

Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Real Warnings (Paperback)

These are the best poems I've ever read. I'm a huge fan of poetry, and I can honestly say with all humility, Trulls', "The Real Warnings" is an amazing collection of some of the finest work I've ever read.

I would highly recommend this collection to my friends and family -- as a matter of fact, I've already done that. I've loaned the book to several people who have also enjoyed the poetry.

I would give this poetry book 10 stars! It was THAT good.