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.