Received - Farang by Peter Blair

Farang poems by Peter Blair - Autumn House Press

"Peter Blair's Farang utilizes the best elements of the travelogue, memoir, and documentary. These poems are panoramic and introspective, foreign and intimate. Crossing genres and cultures, Blair writes lucidly from the crossroads where memory and empathy intersect." - Terrance Hayes



"Lyrics poetry knows little of the East beyond Pound's "River Merchant's Wife" or Yeat's "Asiatic vague immensities." Now we have the moody, fragrant, and luminous poems of Peter Blair's Farang. Like a path between broken temples, Farang shows us a Thailand losing its past in sex bars, the fractured dreams of women, the lonely, predatory men. Can the heart's affections reach across space and nation? Blair lived and taught in Thailand, was marked as the white and fleshy farang until he nearly forgot himself. Only death brings him back to the U.S., the foreign imperium. The songs of Farang move like dark clouds and flash lightning." - David Gewanter



"The raw and ethereal beauty of Thailand is laced through these lush, narrative poms where the speaker, a foreigner teaching there, lives both inside and outside the "dream of culture..." In the full circle of this book what Blair's world traveler brings home is an aching heart and travel's one true gift - memory..." - Lisa Zimmerman


Peter Blair's most recent book is The Divine Salt published by Autumn House Press. His earlier book, Last Heat won the Washington Prize in 1999. Born in Pittsburgh, he has worked in a psychiatric ward, a steel mill, and served three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Currently he teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.