On David Blair

David Blair's poems come out of what Greil Marcus once called "the old weird America" (still very much with us, underneath the fog of coiffed media blondes and politics-as-spam). His citizens are at play in a long-running tragicomedy. I like how the poems imply that the slightest quirks of a person's character govern the insistent arc of karma. He reminds me a bit of Richard Hugo or Weldon Kees—a cosmopolitan sensibility at loose ends on the country's highways and byways—though in sensibility and formal means he is like neither. Blair has a terrific ear—taut without being high-strung, charming without being precocious, intent without being alarmed. He's a pleasure to read and hear.

—David Rivard, whose most recent book is Bewitched Playground. He teaches at Tufts University.