Autumn House Press

ISBN (paperback): 0-9669419-7-7

About the Book
Peter Blair’s acute devotion to his central subject — our damned and locked-away, our despised and our sub-human — is solid and true. These narratives, elegant and plain, possess unforgettable interior tonal bursts and vocal keenings. The visual layers in the poem “Courtyard”, garden of our brief reprieve, moved me to read the poem aloud and then repeat it to myself as if I’d dreamed those images. Maybe Blair, while sitting in with his companion muses Weil and Whitman, listens in on us, too, in our most desperate and most enlightened milliseconds and gives back to us our own good sense and compassion. From the so-called “quiet-room” of the asylum arrives an aching emotional disorientation with the power to upset our peculiar cold American complacency.

– Judith Vollmer

Blair, poem by poem, rivets together a transcendent spiritual bridge over a blast furnace of suffering. His is a rare and welcome display of artistic power and moral grace.

– Jack Myers