From the Inside: NYC through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here -- George Walla

<em>NYC From the Inside</em> is a gorgeous compendium: 179 poets you have and haven't heard of, generating over 280 boisterous pages of pure joy and pure pain, comedy and memory, satire and lament, lovers and haters, pizzas and drink and drugs, pavements; a call-and-response of Loisaida flinging its truths to the boroughs and getting those truths back again. Come and get it!</p>- Alicia Ostriker, Poet Laureate, New York State 2018-2021</p> </p>An unending array of pleasure: a feast, a banquet, a new taste on every page. It's my desert island pick.</p>- Grace Cavalieri, producer, The Poet and the Poem, US Library of Congress</p> </p>This amazing Anthology, with its captivating rhythms, sounds and beats takes us in an all-encompassing arc around New York - this "selfish city amoeba" with "its shifting forms" under a moon "which looks like an overdose." The poems are connected to each other, a collective stream of consciousness which causes us to wander through neighborhoods in a kind of Joycean Ulysses' trip. The poets' acute eyes for details show us all the different worlds which compose this fast moving place - "with that click-clack speed city rhythm," but also unearth much of the unexpected and the unremembered like a "thin line between explorers and natives - the culture which keeps everyone captured, to which everyone emulates." This is a book of people "doing people things in their small frames." Walking down the subway stairs, we enter the final episode of this trip -