From a Savage City

East St. Louis is a dangerous, exciting, chaotic place where you can get high, get laid, get mellow with music, eat snoots like a prince, get shot, cut, be alive, renovate for Jesus, shoot dice, study poetry, play cards, get religion, or just watch the bullets and razors fly on Friday nights. These ninety poems are from a world of beauty and deadly danger where gunshot is the major cause of death, where shootouts are an entertainment, as shown in the first poem. It is a city where you can contemplate the beauty of the sunrise on the magnificent river while ready to shoot an intruder. East St. Louis is a place of joy where people wait with tubs and buckets when a liquor store burns down. There are other poems about famous people like Chekhov, von Braun, Dinah Washington, Mozart, Gandhi, Rimbaud, Zhu Rongji, Jesse Owens, and more.