It Ain't Truth If It Doesn't Hurt. Buy It Now!

Four years ago, I got an email from an old college friend by the name of Maureen McDole. Maureen, her husband, and a couple other folks had started a new, small press in Florida called Summerfolk, and Maureen wanted to know if I would be interested in submitting a poetry manuscript for consideration for publication.

Does a carriage horse shit in the street?

oOf course, I said yes. It took me about a year to get my act together to get a manuscript to the editors, and in the meantime I met the man I would eventually be with for the next three years. On meeting David, and seeing his art work, I asked him if he would consider a collaboration with me on the book. Twenty poems matched with 20 of his lino cut prints from his Face A Day series. He said yes. The publishers said yes. And so, the concept that would become the book, It Ain't Truth If It Doesn't Hurt, was born.

The last three years have been a wild ride of love, war, growth, change, hurt, loss, pain, and healing. Gabriel Garling with Summerfolk Press designed a fantastic book, but, the economic reality of the times is that the press, a labor of love, has been put on hold due to the recession. Unfortunately that meant that the good people at Summerfolk couldn't print our book.

Enter Sven Davisson at Rebel Satori Press.

About a year ago, I realized that I was well on my way to writing my first novel. By August of last year, I had a good 100 or so pages written. My friends Emanuel Xavier and Charlie Vazquez were both being published by the Queer Mojo imprint of Rebel Satori Press. I asked them if they would put in a good word with their publisher for me. He asked to see a sample of the novel and a synposis. I obliged. He obliged me by giving my a contract for my first novel, Eden Lost, which will be out later this Fall (YES BETTY TISEL I AM WORKING ON THE DANG REVISIONS!). In May, Sven descended from his mighty mountain eyrie in Maine to attend the book release party for Emanuel Xavier's latest project, Me No Hablo con Acento, and I had a chance to meet and hang out with Sven. I mentioned, in passing, that I had this completed manuscript that I was considering self-publishing. Sven gave me complete side eye and said, "No, no. Send it to me. If I like it, I will publish it."

Sven liked it. Sven published it. You can order it right now. Help a broke writer be less broke and do yourself a favor...get an amazing book with poetry and art that is, in my humble opinion, amazing. But don't just take my word for it. Take their words too:

"Brandon Lacy Campos is an important poet that doesn't cut corners and doesn't compromise. His work is vivid, jagged, and it takes up space in the most beautiful way. To invest time in getting familiar with his poetry is to invest in vitality. I hope this is just the first shout to announce the arrival of his chorus." -Bao Phi, author of Song I Sing.

"Brandon Lacy Campos is a word thief of the best and brightest kind, pilfering from “a corrupt system that must fall/If we’re ever to have liberty and justice for all.” These scathing, impassioned poems kick up stars dragged along asphalt—with outlandish sass, old-time funk, and a hot, ever-shimmying soul that could teach the stiffest otherness in anyone more than a few things about its most generous self." Ed Bok Lee, best selling author of Real Karaoke People.

"Brandon Lacy Campos is part tomahawk thrower and part philosopher, a fresh voice of queer rebellion, an outsider talking of revolution, avenging exploitation. The stinging lashes on a slave’s back, the mystical incantations of native medicine men, the curiosities of an innocent white child and the cultural bisection of a bilingual Latino—these are the things he sees, as these are the things he is. These poems are monuments to the victims of abuse, to the splendor of visionary queer consciousness—to true America." Charlie Vázquez, fiction writer, blogger and host of the queer East Village reading series, PANIC!, author of Contraband and co-editor of From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (get this book too! It includes an excerpt from Eden Lost).


You can buy your copy of It Ain't Truth If It Doesn't Hurt, today!