Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Running Late

Running Late

Belair, Mark

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1950462269
ISBN13: 9781950462261
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Published: Oct 30 2019
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.44
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.98 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
Running Late is a hymn to the moments of revelation and connection that illuminate a life, glimpsed while hurrying through it. In Mark Belair's moving poems, the mundane is often unexpectedly transformed into the sacramental: tools in a shed, a waft of hot tar, sunlit back alleys full of junk, a radiator, a burned-out car, a pigeon on a tenement fire escape, a collection of parked strollers-even inanimate things have a hidden soul / made manifest, just as much as the human characters who people these pages. The speaker is a flâneur who pays compassionate attention to the unlovely, the neglected, and the apparently prosaic, inviting us to slow down, observe, focus on what matters-a child on a stoop, say, or weary immigrant cab drivers blaring their horns a long way from home. This is a wise and deeply humane book.

Catherine Jagoe, author of Bloodroot

The snapshots presented in Mark Belair's Running Late are commonplace, but he observes and mulls them-the scarred, stained floor of a coffee import shop, delivery bikes behind the door of a closed pizzeria, a painter's poled roller/ reaching high up/ [a] weathered wall-until their implications emerge. The more personal lyrics among these chiseled, free-verse poems, are direct and unabashed-neither sentimental nor afraid of sentiment.

Bill Christophersen

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