<p>Randy Blasing&rsquo;s ninth book of poems, set now in memory in his native Minnesota and now in New England, New Mexico, or Turkey, centers on his drama of dying four times in open-heart surgery and emerging from his near-death experience a different person, with renewed faith in the sanctity of every day.</p><p><em>&ldquo;A Change of Heart, </em>with its nod to Auden, is a mature collection celebratory of life. The speaker who cheats death is that much more aware of the living, breathing world around him. Heightened meditations are rendered in tender, explosive sonnets and exact blank verse. Here is the heart as muscle and life force, as vehicle for romance, as the beating meter of each of these glorious poems.&rdquo;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &mdash;Denise Duhamel&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&ldquo;James Wright famously aspired to write poetry that privileged, above all, &lsquo;the pure, clear word.&rsquo;</p><p>Randy Blasing seeks the same demanding goal in this fluent and moving collection of sonnets and near-sonnets, poems limpid, graceful, and fearless in their reckonings with mortality, in which craft and longing are alchemized into something like wonder.&rdquo;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &mdash;David Wojahn</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Randy Blasing&rsquo;s ninth book of poems, set now in memory in his native Minnesota and now in New England, New Mexico, or Turkey, centers on his drama of dying four times in open-heart surgery and emerging from his near-death experience a different person, with renewed faith in the sanctity of every day.</p>