Louis Armstrong said it, Marijuana is an assistant, a friend. These poems riff off that theme, a fifty-year-long set of improv-collaborations between two old friends, Miss Mary Jane and her man, Sam.Poems too of a classicist, on familiar terms with Sappho, Archilochus, Horace, Socrates — regulars in the audience along with Miles, Billy, Bessie, Woody — hard listeners for poems that are bluesy, bopsy, beat, Whitmanesque, funny, generous, passionately committed, intellectually rigorous, sometimes savage — poems that swing hard, come on hard, poems from Brooklyn, America, Greece, London — in-your-face poems. And always poems composed not in the head but on the breath. Poems that can only — the author insists — be read aloud.The goal is to perfect the world, to sing the golden age into America, an absurd goal, but only by constantly risking absurdity can we become human.