As Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate said, "These poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent, and funny. The Virginia-born poet and the lead singer of the Silver Jews expresses his observations of pop-culture, Southern history, souvenirs, community colleges, back pain, hallways, and the weirdness of daily life.

Avoided this for a long time because I assumed these were gussied up variations of David Berman's lyrics for The Silver Jews. has been a dark year, and hearing lines like "I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion" can be a comfort when you finally feel understood. Instead of a long and ultimately not satisfactory review, I'll simply quote just a few of my favorite lines from this collection (if the pages with dog ears give me any idea of how many quotes I wanted to remember, it looks like I enjoyed one from at least each page). I came to this collection shamefully late, especially considering the more than a decade under the influence of his music in Silver Jews, of which David Berman is the frontman along with members of the band Pavement (including the always amazing Stephen Malkmus and on a few Bonnie 'Prince' Billy tracks). In her 2009 book Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, Kaya Oakes wrote, "In many ways, just as indie rock was nudging its way toward the mainstream, Actual Air helped to open the doors for independent publishing to do the same.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. His poems chart a course through his own highly original American dreamscape in language that is fresh, accessible, and remarkably precise.

And while these can be funny and entertaining individually, whole poems composed of them quickly become old: "The evening train is a literary device. Instead, I guess I'll be at home, having dinner with my wife, watching my cats laze around and play, watching the late-summer sunlight fade out of the sky through the red maple in my front yard, trying to appreciate again the way the dark leaves change color as the light of the day changes, from a kind of amber to something more inky as evening comes, maybe I'll also listen to some records by the man I was going to be seeing play his music live for the second time in my life.I read that he lived in Washington DC for a time, in those lost years, and I wondered if I happened to pass him, unknowingly, when I was off on some stupid excursion, one of my heroes, a stranger in the street, that I didn't recognize him because I never would have thought to be looking for him.