Randy Blasing has published five previous collections of poetry and six books of translation, including Poems of Nazim Hikmet. Among his awards are grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Providence and teaches at the Community College of Rhode Island.

About Second Home:

Second Home is a varied and sustained performance, in which the poet is devoted to salvaging memory, 'giving the past a future,' and 'linking his days with correspondences.' In poem after poem the reader follows the moves of a mind engaged in making a web of all its experience. The earlier poems in Blasing's book, and some of the later, tend to recover familial or personal memories; but the central (and title) section — a suite of fifty poems having fourteen decasyllabic lines each — takes us to Turkey and a more complex field of reference. Many of these 'Second Home' poems have individual interest and charm, but there also transpires from the series as a whole a strong sense of ligation across all limits of time, place, and culture. So casually and concretely does this happen that the poems seem less the work of an assembling will than the discovery of a world 'riddled with connections.'"
—Richard Wilbur

"Randy Blasing's poems are at once tranquil and unsettling, condensed and expansive. His images are deceptively clear and sharp, for time and again in these poems memory is folded bck upon itself. The result is a series of poignant juxtapositions of present and past, as one house, town, or episode becomes its own antitype half a world away.
—Rachel Hadas