Blevins is a writer and poet who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College System. She has published poems, essays, and stories in many magazines, journals, and anthologies. In this essay, Blevins examines how Simpson uses free verse or open form as opposed to fixed verse.

Louis Simpson's "In the Suburbs" is a criticism of American suburban life—an expression of the poet's feelings of hopelessness about a country of people who "are too slow for death, and change / to stone." Simpson expresses this same sentiment about more specific Americans in another poem included in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, At The End of the Open Road, which also contains "In the Suburbs." In its criticism of middle-class America, "In the Suburbs" is akin to many poems of the 1950s and 1960s, recalling the opinions of other poets of Simpson's generation...