“John Blair is one of those poets who can do almost anything with a line: make it hum, make it fly—‘to fill the space where wings once sung in you.’ Playful Song Called Beautiful presents musings on mortality that’ll make you glad to be alive.”—David Galef, author, My Date with Neanderthal Woman

“In these poems, a foodie banquet of delicious, exotic, risky platters of language glides before us. The dark and grit of a Baudelaire becomes the elegance of a Yeats, or the logic of an Auden gives way to the effervescent mysteries of a Rimbaud. In these wonderful meditations upon the world’s uncertainties, we’re thrilled by the dangerous, delightful turns.”—John Bensko, author, Visitations

“Rife with juicy epigraphs, gleeful alliteration, and dynamic enjambment, John Blair’s latest book feels like philosophy filtered through wit and joy. Who could have imagined that insouciance and insight, though they share a prefix, could seem so akin, but here comes Playful Song Called Beautiful as proof.”—Cyrus Cassells

“In John Blair’s Playful Song Called Beautiful, rolling tercets become the unlikely medium for all manner of slippery, expansive, and emotive thinking. In these quietly arresting poems, opposites rhyme and the past gains all the grit of the present. And yet, amidst all this memory, ‘There is no future.’ For Blair, poetry is process, a forum where ‘Today is under / construction, thank you / for waiting.’ Nietzsche, Galileo, Goethe, Plato, Joyce, and others make visitations, and they, too, suffer the pressure, ‘the lovely pain’ of the present, must mean something now to this fierce, philosophical, and unforgiving sensibility. Blair’s poetry is shifting and its mutable meaning is ‘all the comfort you need, all / the comfort you get.’”—Craig Morgan Teicher, judge, 2015 Iowa Poetry Prize