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Today's poem is "It's Morning Again in America"
from Three-Day Weekend

Gunpowder Press

Christopher Blackman is a poet from Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Sixth Finch, Southeast Review, and DIAGRAM, among other places. His debut book of poems, Three-Day Weekend, was published by Gunpowder Press in 2024. He lives outside of Boston.

Other poems on the web by Christopher Blackman:
Three poems
"Meditation at Colonial Williamsburg"
Three poems
"Springtime; The Storm"
"Lunch in The Summer"
Two poems
Two poems

Christopher Blackman's Website.

Christopher Blackman on Twitter.

About Three-Day Weekend:

"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 Cohen

"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 Leonard

"I 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



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