NCWN

Shadows Trail Them Home by Scott Owens and Priscilla Campbell

Clemson University Press
$15.00, paperback
ISBN: 0-978-9835339-7-9
December, 2012
Poetry
Available from the publisher

"Shadows Trail Them Home is an excellent and compelling novel in poetry, an important contribution to the cultural canon of American life, presented in an engaging but disturbing context. It needs to be read by a wide audience, not only those who have faced abuses as children, as the two main characters have and, consequently, suffer severe (but not disabling) life-long responses, but also by a reading public that treasures poetry that fuses superior writing with major social issues. This penetrating book is compassionately narrated, as it articulates the extent to which the past can never really be overcome, even though one may be bent on altering it."
—Ronald Moran, author of The Jane Poems and Waiting

"The story of Norman and Sara exposes innumerable shades of joy and pain in our deepest human drive—the one that dances us toward, away from, but ever toward love."
—Suzanne Hudson, prize-winning author of In the Dark of the Moon

"Scott Owens and Priscilla Campbell create characters by reading our souls, create scenes by framing the pictures that live in our memories, too raw to remember, too vivid to ever completely ignore, and in these poems, they have a die-hard nonfiction writer turning pages as fast as possible to see what happens next. I didn't know poets could do that. Scott Owens and Pris Campbell can."
—Shari Smith, author of Gunpowder, Cowboy Boots, and Mascara

Scott Owens is the author of ten collections of poetry. His prior work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Next Generation/ Indie Lit Awards, the North Carolina Writers' Network, the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. His more than 1,100 published poems have been in Georgia Review, North American Review, Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, The South Carolina Review, Poetry East and elsewhere. He is the founder of Poetry Hickory, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and 234, and vice president of the Poetry Council of North Carolina and the North Carolina Poetry Society. He has taught at the college, high school, middle school, and community levels for more than twenty-five years. Born and raised in Greenwood, South Carolina, he currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, North Carolina.

The poems of Pris Campbell have been published in numerous journals. The most recent include PoetsArtists, The Dead Mule, Outlaw Poetry Network, Rusty Truck and Wild Goose Review. She has had six poetry collections published by the small press and has been included in a number of anthologies. Her most recent collections include Sea Trails, a riff from her trip down the east coast in a twenty-two-foot sailboat, published by Lummox Press, and Postscripts to the Dead, published by MiPOesias Publishing. One of her poems is featured in The Poet’s Market 2013. Nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and numerous Best of the Net awards, she also was recently contacted by Pearson Publishing for permission to include one of her poems in their next textbook alongside Margaret Atwood. A former Clinical Psychologist, she has been sidelined by ME/CFS since 1990 and makes her home in the greater West Palm Beach, Florida. Her website is www.poeticinspire.com.