Description
Three-Day Weekend, by Christopher Blackman, was selected by Nan Cohen for the Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize. Of this collection, Nan writes:
The poems in this book reframe the daily and habitual to reveal the strange, rich interiors of ordinary moments: sitting in a traffic jam, tilted back in a dentist’s chair, thinking of an old joke while looking at a famous painting. Christopher Blackman is alert to the ironies that link the comedy and tragedy of existence, yet his poems are never arch or brittle. They start, as so many unforgettable poems do, by welcoming us with lucidity and candor into the particulars of someone else’s life; they end by handing us back our own lives, transformed.
—Nan CohenAdditional praise for Three-Day Weekend:
The poems of Christopher Blackman’s poignant Three-Day Weekend search for authenticity beneath the fluorescent glow of late capitalism. Who might we be free of our jobs and shorn of limiting social norms? What might we turn our attention to before it’s too late? Blackman’s candid—and often funny—poems reach out from a “stretch of time that precedes the pageant’s end” to grab the reader by the shoulders and shake them awake.
—Keith LeonardI really like these Chaplinesque lyrics, the prat-fall wisdom of their lines, the stumbling beauty of their turns, the charm of the speaker’s ill-timed realizations…. The book is more than a snack-pak of pop pleasure; it is secretly a solemn buffet. These passages begin in the intoxications of bars and radios and movie theaters, but lead into the enduring, sober territories of interior history, the fantods and grace of love and death, and they end questioningly, wisely befuddled, standing beside the reader, saying “I’m the last one left in the poem, and I’m a little afraid / to be here without anything else to distract me.”
—Ed Skoog
