3 Nights of the Perseids, by Ned Balbo

Ned Balbo’s new book channels the Robert Frost of narrative blank verse poems and of short and focused sonnets. These are poems set in this strange world of baseball and tattooed girls, Choose Your Adventure and LSD, WikiLeaks and Smart TVs, crop circles and UFO reports, yet also in the stranger world behind the world, a place of threat where “harbingers” and “celestial menace” are always hanging over us like the prophesies of Nostradamus or the calamitous trajectory of a meteor turned meteorite. It is a book obsessed with music and social injustice, but running through it all is keen sorrowing awareness of time—time which gives us the “news/a century old” in a Wild West tour as if to crack open “history itself, a box shut tight.” 3 Nights of the Perseids sings with backward-looking elegies, a present tense of political and social critiques, and fearful prophesies of the future. Look up, this book says, before it’s too late.—Tony Barnstone Please note: Member price includes shipping. Ned is happy to inscribe and autograph this for you. Just include a note as to whom you'd like the book inscribed.