At once unnervingly learned and boldly feelingful, Richard Blevins is  a  hero of the contemporary long-form poem, and Captivity Narratives’ driven reconsiderations of the disappeared careers of photographer Fred Holland Day and poet Adelaide Crapsey have a sweep and an intimacy that excite from line to alert line. With their heady synchronies and hyperlucid lyric fragments, their unearthings and upendings, their questing meditations and meditative narratives, their bursts of aphorism and doses of tonic fact, these are poems of an unusually welcoming intelligence and of an unassuming mastery. “If you want to keep a secret, print it in a poem,” Blevins writes, and fortunate is any reader privy to the confidences volunteered in these generous, essential pages.

        Gary Lutz, Author of Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive

With a few disparate lines, Rich Blevins invokes an era, and with them we see ‘peripherally’ (as the poet similarly characterizes Day’s own images) two nearly forgotten artists, Fred Holland Day and Adelaide Crapsey, and their ‘imaginary narratives.’ At times a surreal journey through time, space, and history, at others a perceptive exploration of sensibilities, the Captivity Narratives is both lyrical and elegiac.

     Patricia J. Fanning, author of Through an Uncommon Lens:

                                            The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day