Early in his career, Andy Clausen chose "Ma Joad's people, the blues singer's people, the backwoods and backalley ones" as "my chosen people," and he has unswervingly followed that path through over thirty years worth of oral poetry whose pagescript can only barely suggest the power of his voice-yet the depth of feeling is always there, even on the page. Allen Ginsberg once characterized Andy's voice as "heroic, a vox populi of the democratic unconscious," and his work is all of that-outspoken, openly politicized and hugely, roughly spiritual, but what is often overlooked is the admittedly risky tenderness and intimacy of much of his work-from the heartbreaking honesty of childhood sorrow in "Send You Back" to the unabashed clear memory of his own excitement at his daughter's birth in "Ramona." Some of his best work is here, including the comic sadness of "Ahoj! Mr. President, Ahoj!" and immense paradoxes of "Gokyo Lake," the prophetic "They Are Coming" ("the derelict women poets are coming!"), and the tears of "The Night Kerouac Died." The book does lack a few of his best poems-perhaps most notably the revelatory "The Porters of Namaste," the heroic "At the Top of My Lungs: An Open Letter to the Russian People," and the early, almost objectivist working sequence, "In the Cab-Out of the Cab." Yet it's the best shot of Andy's long and distinguished peripatetic workingman's blues now available, thirty years of rough and tumble poetry that pulls no punches and sings like there's no tomorrow.

Andy's a bull in the china shop of American poetry, exactly where a bull ought to be. Whether he's singing the body plutoniumized, lamenting the destruction of American beauty, or simply trying to coax some woman into bed, he's a singer you can trust (even if the woman may have some doubts. & he's been treated shamefully by the literary powers-that-be.

Bob Rixon, WFMU-FM>

Great little book packed full of political poetry which really made me think and was also portable enough to pack in my pocket to take on the road.... not to mention that it was compiled by my favorite author, Allen Ginsberg. A must read for activists and Ginsberg fans alike.