experimental transmission of the post modern vehicle gleefully downshifting into the breezy updrafts of the traditional musics of English verse, and then lurching into the future again. Smokes contains elegies, poems of urban and domestic angst, laments, invectives, cakewalks, struts. It's very much of the moment but it is also a deeply literary book -- how could it not be? And its confident rueful, and playful grasp of its tradition is eye-opening and, sardonic as it is, boisterous fun." -- the Afterword by Robert Hass

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