Open Carry

As one poem in this volume asks, "What good is freedom / If you're not liberated from yourself?" Freedom is what "Open Carry" is about-finding it, savoring it, fighting against its enemies, and (especially) breaking out of the prison behind your name. Like the streets of my hometown New York, this book will throw you into a carnival of contrasts between lofty and low, burgher and bum, grownup and child. Jumping from free verse and sonnets to doggerel-elegies to jokes-romance to ribaldry-the philosophical to the political-sorrow to merriment-epiphanies to laments . . . the poems inside these pages represent instants of fleeting clarity that wouldn't let me rest until I had saved them from my own forgetting. There will be poems in here that you will want to carry with you-and some as unwelcome as a poke in the eye. Consider that a promise. Consider too "Open Carry" not as a book of poems but a hologram in which all the poems together project an image, however rough, of the author.