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Read the first poem of Rhett Iseman Trull’s collection and you’ll know why she won the Anhinga Press prize for poetry. It jumps at you.

Here’s part of “The Real Warnings Are Always Too Late:”

I want to go back to the winter I was born and warn you
that I will flood through your life like acid
and you will burn yourselves on me.
On my sixteenth birthday, I will use the candles
to set the basement aflame and run out laughing,
wearing smoke like a new dress. With a pocket knife,
I will try to root out that life you so eagerly started.
I’ll dent the garage door with my head, siphon Crown Royal
from your liquor cabinet, jump from a gondola in Venice. I’ll smash
my ankle with a hammer, drive through stop signs
with my eyes closed, cost you thousands
in medical bills. Forget about sleeping.

“The Real Warnings” (Ahinga Press: P.O. Box 10595, Tallahassee, FL.; 84 pages, $15, http://www.anhinga.org/) is her first book. Trull lives in Greensboro and grew up in Winston-Salem. A graduate of Duke, she holds an MFA in creative writing from UNCG. She and her husband edit a poetry magazine, “Cave Wall,” which is published in Greensboro.

The language in her best poems avoids abstract words as if they were poison ivy. Her word choices are the things of this world. You can smell and touch and bark your shins on them. Line breaks swing. They build momentum into compelling narratives. The most intense poems sweep like fast water across the page. They carry you to unforeseen eddies. You catch your breath and feel the undercurrent before being buoyed to shore.

Here is “Signs”:

Today has been hollowed out by your death
like a thrown-away fruit rind rotting in the fairgrounds
in the off-season, between a gum wrapper and a torn ticket,
beside what used to be The Ghost Train.

The sky is the color of dirty rain and nothing
flies in it. Skeletal trees rasp their limbs together
like a witch’s ready fingers. And I am glad.
What I can’t say, the tipped-over shopping cart outside Wal-Mart

says for me. And the hub cap rusting in the ditch grass, the bent
candy-cane decoration losing its grip on the streetlight
downtown. The world is a tied-on fender, you once said,
Then winked, But the rope is strong. When the doctors

moved you from home, your lawn was kept mowed,
and even now someone remembers to plug in your tree, the one
your best friend strung with three thousand lights
while your lungs worked against your bucking heart.

Tonight: no moon, no stars. I never realized before
how noisy planets are. I praise their choice
to be absent. I praise the protruding ribs
of the stray ducking under the crawl space. For I know

there will come a day when the trees
are a Kelly green belly-laugh in a sugared breeze, dogs
with meaty voices will frisk under a rekindled moon,
and I’ll fall asleep without tears, traitor to my grief.

Insights, like mushrooms, pop up among the shards of emotion:

You will learn to loathe and love
The yes that saves you …

…And 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.

Gritty and fierce, the poems celebrate love, passion, and how the wounded survive strung-out loneliness, break-ups, and self-destructiveness. At times, the tone is “an alarm wailing in the night, set off by a banging shutter.” But there’s also plenty of humor and wit and tenderness.

From “Lotion Cigarettes Candles Wine:”

I suppose she’s the better choice. She cooks you
healthy dinners, gives the best back massage.
She’s read more books and had more sex than I.
She’s thinner with longer eyelashes and always wins
Trivial Pursuit. Even the contents of her freezer,
scallops and coffee beans, speak of sophistication. …

In the Triad, Trull will read at 7 p.m. on Oct. 29 in the UNCG Faculty Center, 2 p.m. on Nov. 22 at Barnes & Noble in Winston-Salem, and 4 p.m. on Dec. 5 at the Community Book Shop in Greensboro.

Catch her if you can. Trull rules.