Running Late

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