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It's easy to overstate the relevance of a book's title, but here, Etch and Blur speaks to Jamie Thomas' engaging tendency to stake out a territory and then doubt the validity of the claim. The poems aren't static but move lithely between holding and letting go, order and mess, suggesting his driving interest is the difficulty of sifting through consciousness for what is genuine in any moment.

—Bob Hicok

The heartening poems in Jamie Thomas’ Etch and Blur really get at America by eschewing reverse cultural generalizations and getting to the grit and ironies that defy nationality; it really affirms how indispensable poetry is to a life bombarded and over stimulated by directives, aesthetic pretensions, wired information and glib competing ideas of how it is we are supposed to make our lives and our poetry current and relevant.  Forget such entitlements: Thomas KNOWS bad TV, pink slips, automotive disrepair, stalled-out bars, smeared urban starlight.  He un-privileges pop-freedom, which in our poetry has in so many ways become opportunistic—and puts us back in traffic.  His humor, not trendy or derisive, but consoling, backs into pockets of compassion, one imagination at a time.  With an undeterred syntax that—to rephrase Stevens—almost resists the rhapsodic successfully.  A flat-out knock out debut, this book helps me see another’s life and restores me to my own.

—William Olsen

The poems in Etch and Blur are much like carnival rides which whirl the passenger around and around, higher, then lower through perspective after perspective—yet, when they deliver you back to earth, you find yourself paradoxically sober. Wry, many-eyed, dogged, and tender, these poems artfully embody an earnest, struggling heart inside a wry and dexterous mind.

 —Tony Hoagland