Choice Words combines new poems with those Randy Blasing wishes to reprint from his six collections to date. This selection traces the making of a self and a mapping of the world in poems about the double life of writing, of finding the language that gives personal history the permanence of art and lets it be relived in memory, whether the experience is growing up in a Bible Belt suburb during the Atomic Age, going West to California, settling back East in New England, the death of parents, the birth of a son, or spending thirty summers exploring Turkey.

Praise for the first six books:

“A varied and sustained performance. In poem after poem the reader follows the moves of a mind engaged in making a web of all its experience.”
—Richard Wilbur

“A book that comes from the heart and will help every reader search his own. A wonderful achievement!.”
—J.D. McClatchy

“Blasing has few if any rivals when it comes to writing gut-wrenching, lyrical poetry.”
—Booklist

“Richly detailed and skillfully worded. The “Mediterranean” poems are as evocative as any in our language.”
—Ja,mes Merrill

“The spare lines shine with bright, curiously right images that fix the exact mood and particular meaning from the several bands of Blasing’s inventive spectrum.”
—Booklist

“These poems are luminously objective. They diagram the odd and unexpected ways the natural world and history break into human consciousness.”
—Library Journal

“A refreshing young poet. Buy it. You’ll be pleased.”
—Saturday Review

About
the
Author

Randy Blasing, a graduate of Carleton College and the University of Chicago, Has also published eight books of translation, including Poems of Nazim Hikmet and Hikmet’s epic Human Landscapes from My Country, and has received grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for he Arts.