Drawing its energy from society's underbelly—the dim corner booths of bars, the stalls of public bathrooms, the thickets of unkempt parks—Vaughan's book is part prose poem, part fractured sonnet, part Whitmanian love-cry.

• Dorianne Laux Robert Vaughan's poems are peopled with painfully human characters, depicted with unnerving authenticity and irreverent compassion.
• Ellen Bass