"The Shape of Things to Come: Poems, John Blair's deeply considered and deeply felt exploration of the creation of the atomic bomb, takes its epigraph from Ginsberg, and Blair is clearly among Ginsberg's heirs. Blair's research is meticulous, but these poems are more candescence than history; their needle hangs, quivering, in perfect balance between beautiful and awful; their caesuras and fragments constantly disrupt what can be said and understood with the stutters of what never can be. This riveting work brings together the best qualities of both narrative and lyric to illuminate everything, past and present, in the blinding blaze of atomic Moloch, 'a sun /...rising too bright to see & burning / hot enough to sear away even this lonely unendurable world.'"
—Catherine Carter, author of Larvae of the Nearest Stars and Marks of the Witch
