Inspired and informed by the music and urban landscape of New York City, Tongue & Groove employs jazzy and descriptive language in a sweep of city-life experiences and memories. A passionate rendering of incidents in spaces that include the subway, a school for the handicapped, and the Museum of Modern Art, Stephen Cramer employs richly sensual language and a wide range of imagery. Alluring portrayals of butterfly migrations, graffiti, and city buses complement this collection's connection to the everyday hoots, shouts, and yammer of the streets.| Contents: I. 3 Wheels 6 Getting Over 9 Glaciers 11 Mockingbird 13 Satin 14 Strings II. 19 The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting 22 The Painters at MoMA 24 Taste 27 Before You 29 The Ark 32 Fuel 34 Cure III. Amulet: A Tryptich 39 Ascension 42 Swallow Tail 45 Thor?s Hammer A Broken Diptych: 48 Imprint 50 Glass of Milk Seams of Departure 52 Cloisters 55 Kneading IV. 59 Three Card Monty 62 Curses 63 Missing It 65 Signing 68 Shadow & Mirror 70 Sweet Little Angel 73 East River View: Renditions 77 Notes |

"I can think of almost no other young poet who can claim Stephen Cramer's lyric authority and self-possession. His odes and elegies capture the grit and delights of New York City in a manner that manages to capture something of Crane's sense of the marvelous with Oppen's descriptive acuity. This is to say he follows in the footsteps of the giants—and he shows himself abundantly capable of filling their shoes. Tongue & Groove is a ravishing book."—David Wojahn

"Cramer's Tongue and Groove celebrates Manhattan's vibrancy and the passionate self-expression of its denizens. . . . Tongue and Groove is a book of linguistic and formal performance. . . . This performance is fluent and exuberant."—Antioch Review
"Stephen Cramer's Tongue & Groove seeks unity through clarity. Each poem here forms a world of its own, but the poet . . . gives us a map of sound, where the pastoral and the urban inform each other, and the only level and plumb line that matter is the heart."—Yusef Komunyakaa
|Stephen Cramer is the author of Shiva's Drum, a National Poetry Series winner. He lives in New York City. He teaches in the creative writing program at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont.