Sometimes the Light

by Rick Campbell

201 pages, Paperback

Published March 11, 2022

About the author

Rick Campbell was the director of Anhinga Press for twenty years and is the founding director of the Florida Literary Arts Coalition and its Other Words Conference. He teaches in the Sierra Nevada College low residency MFA program and also teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida.

He has won a Pushcart prize, an NEA fellowship in poetry, and two poetry fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Poems and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Florida Review, Prairie Schooner, Fourth River, Kestrel, Puerto Del Sol, New Madrid and other journals.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

For the Trident series author, see Rick Campbell.

Reviews

[Linda Heuring]

I have read Rick Campbell's poetry and an occasional non-fiction piece of his in the past, so I was interested in reading SOMETIMES THE LIGHT. I was not disappointed. He made me laugh out loud at his Florida, shed a tear for his family, and roll my eyes at the world of baseball. "How do we tell fiction from lies, or, more importantly, lies from fiction?" he writes. It's a worthy question, and for this memoir, one he confronts head on.

[Justin Hamm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes the Light is by turns meditative, funny, sad--but in every mood the storytelling remains clear, honest, natural, and driven by insightful observation. There is an ease in Campbell's narrative voice that allows the reader to become comfortable and relaxed, so that after a while, when something moving or profound has gone down, the realization takes a moment to fully hit before you realize this voice also knows some things about living.