Publishers Weekly praised the book, comparing parts of it to the poetry of John Ashbery and Thomas Lux and writing, "Berman's debut [announces] the discovery of great American poetic storytelling by a new generation.

His poems chart a course through his own highly original American dreamscape in language that is fresh, accessible, and remarkably precise. Yet the two are eternally wedded together in the way they both scratch those terrible existential itches of life, and the way both maintain a youthful fondness for existence that hasn’t lessened with age. It's whatever the opposite of Kafkaesque would be: instead of dwelling on the horrors of bureaucracy and its totalitarian overgrowth, Berman describes the evils of American society with beautiful imagery. It leaves me feeling a bizarre sort of nostalgic melancholy for a folksy place from long ago that never was, but currently is. He has a firm control of much of his material; a good sense of balance between narrative passages and more free-association types of passages; and a sense of what will be evocative, what will seem like some sort of subtle twist.

However, the first poem in this collection, "Snow", I had read before; it may be a "greatest hit" of sorts for him, as there seem to be a lot of online references and commentary about it. self-portrait at 28" is a work of particular brilliance; each time i read it i am piqued and comforted, loving it anew. In his review for Spin, Joshua Clover praised the book, writing, "his instrument is his own; very few of the poems fail to find a finger of mystery, a ring of familiarity.

My copy has become tatty from carrying it around in my laptop bag, I've had it for a few weeks and It's stayed in the side pocket while 5-6 novels have been and gone. I can’t count the number of times I’ve sang and strummed to an audience of stars and moon the song Random Rules, or took years off my eardrums to The Wild Kindness or Punks in the Beerlight. Over and over again his music and poetry made meaning for me and comforted me and made me laugh and made me sad and made me look at the objects and people and situations of this world in a new light. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Drag City has reprinted Actual Air, the acclaimed book of poetry from Silver Jews and Purple Mountains’ David Berman, who died last August. These artists are suffering and I'd trade all the comfort of their music for them to have not been suffering. fm, and guess what just came on that's right "Send in The Clowns" by Sliver Jews, before that Mountian Goats and a Marcal Proust reading!