"It's like this: It's late at night, or very early in the morning, and you're walking down an empty street, and everything is utterly still and silent; and then you pass by an apartment building and someone on the third floor has a window open, and you hear some music playing, very softly. The music bounces off the walls of the buildings and you can make out the tune, pure and intimate and playing just for you. And that's what you get with Barry Gifford's poetry. It's direct, tender, wry, and heartbreaking." --Rob Christopher, Chicagoist "Like Minerva Jones, the village poet in Edgar Lee Masters' 1916 Spoon River Anthology , all-around writer Barry Gifford croons out these poem-prose reflections in a well-distilled voice that booms and whispers with life . What connects New York, 1960 to post-War 1916 USA and Barry Gifford's 21st century is the measure of his lyric, narrative breath. --Al Young, former poet laureate of California "Gifford sketches marvelous characters as deftly as William Faulkner and animates them in scene after scene of hilarious dialogue . Barry Gifford continues to be one of America's most original writers.

" -- Playboy "Gifford, a master of the short story and nasty vignette, can sum up in a few words the cruelty, horror, and crushing banality that shape an entire life." -- New York Times Book Review "Gifford's admirers can't be faulted for imprecision. He's a moving target, as omnivorous as he is prolific, having published poetry, novels, story collections, memoirs, biographies of William Saroyan and Jack Kerouac, art criticism, plays, screenplays, a libretto, and nonfiction monographs about horse racing and the Chicago Cubs. Even this kind of classification is inaccurate: his history of the Cubs is really a memoir, his poems read like prose, his prose like poetry." -- New York Times Book Review.