A Change of Heart

Randy Blasings ninth book of poems set now in memory in his native Minnesota and now in New England New Mexico or Turkey centers on his drama of dying four times in open-heart surgery and emerging from his near-death experience a different person with renewed faith in the sanctity of every day.A Change of Heart with its nod to Auden is a mature collection celebratory of life. The speaker who cheats death is that much more aware of the living breathing world around him. Heightened meditations are rendered in tender explosive sonnets and exact blank verse. Here is the heart as muscle and life force as vehicle for romance as the beating meter of each of these glorious poems. --Denise Duhamel James Wright famously aspired to write poetry that privileged above all the pure clear word.Randy Blasing seeks the same demanding goal in this fluent and moving collection of sonnets and near-sonnets poems limpid graceful and fearless in their reckonings with mortality in which craft and longing are alchemized into something like wonder. --David WojahnRandy Blasings ninth book of poems set now in memory in his native Minnesota and now in New England New Mexico or Turkey centers on his drama of dying four times in open-heart surgery and emerging from his near-death experience a different person with renewed faith in the sanctity of every day.