Walk Around by David Blair

Reading David Blair’s book of essays is like taking a walk with a smart, well-read friend—and before you know it, you’ve learned an enormous amount about a wide range of topics: Ella Fitzgerald, Robert Lowell, and Tomaž Šalamun, with references to Welcome Back, Kotter, and Cosmo Topper along the way. In prose that is frank and intimate, Blair brings his world to life, in a way that is at once both literary and street-wise—the description of the worst poetry reading of all time is worth the price of admission alone—always keeping the reader in the presence of flesh and blood.—John SkoylesIn the first essay in this wonderful book, David Blair says that as you walk, “you become intensely aware in two directions”—to the outer world and into your own headspace. Also that while walking, you do what writers need to do: “you get out of your own way.” Blair’s essays are just like that. They’re so fresh because they are, as he writes of Seamus Heaney, “the opposite of self-impressed.” His own in