Braggs confronts us with a combination of hard realism and musical lyricism, painting unforgettable images in unforgettable language. This is American poetry at its finest: as spacious as Walt Whitman, as frank as the Beat Poets, and as alive with witness as the poetry of the Black Arts Movement. Braggs is a master storyteller, brings a wide range of characters and social circumstances to life on the page.Prophetic, American as the blues, Braggs' poems take the outrages of recent history into a vision where the heart and humor, irony and vulnerability enable poet and community to survive and sometimes sing. There is breathtaking bravery and edge to the voice here, Joycean stream of consciousness that refuses to be censored or subdued.If poetry is music, Earl S. Braggs is its composer — in smoky, sensual, serpentine stanzas of jazzy poetry at its improvisational best: staccato-trumpeting lines, tempo-driven voices, melodic repetitions pouring into the corners of our consciousness, ragtiming us into booty-shaking highs, and tenor-saxing us into deep, deep downs.