Tongue & Groove

"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

"What I love about these poems is the parabolic nature of so many of them: the very concrete physicality of the language that turns quickly in some new direction, or makes a connection with a shift of pronoun or verb tense that opens the poem out, gives it space."--Jean Gallagher

"All of the poems in this collection are aesthetically carved. Each an organically conceived arrangement with its own unique shape . . . a clustering of lines in stanzas, lively but restrained swirls of symmetries."--Scott Hightower