True Figures by David Blair

"Who doesn’t love short(er) poems, those delectable crystallized consumables? I can think of nothing I wouldn’t trust David Blair to tell me something interesting about: gray seasides, movies from pulp horror to high art, a crowded bar, a suburban Whole Foods, just-rural horses penned in a field, John Donne. The poems overflow with crisp original images, which surround every subject with a dazzle. And then the dazzle gets slashed through with heartbreaking universality, as in these lines:   The harshness of life is made sweet   by companionship, coin of the realm.   Praise that poverty now.For all its compression, True Figures makes an expansive companion: in loneliness, in wandering, in getting-through, in noticing opportunities to be genuinely alive."

—Kathleen Ossip