“This is a great book! This series of 450 sonnets is such a gripping wild ride I found it hard to put down.  Michael Lally, a professional jazz pianist in his youth, writes sonnets like jazz choruses, each a complete vignette, each moving ahead the narrative of his life.  Hundreds of characters fill these sonnets. Each sonnet contains sharp descriptions of people he has met, their struggles, their humor, their art, each person portrayed with love and respect.  Wherever he goes, whoever he meets, he learns new ways of being, new ways of loving, new ways of writing. He listens to the music of people’s lives and it is echoed in the music of his words. Frank O’Hara

wanted poetry that is better than the movies. This is it! Turn off Netflix and buy this book!“

—Chris Mason

“Michael Lally’s risky, talky, autobiographic, ethnic, disarming, poignant, desperate, consoling, elegiac, wily, vernacular lyrics have been charming and challenging the poetry world for half a century.” 

—Charles Bernstein

“Michael Lally is a gregarious, theatrical, indefatigable, funny, and sometimes pugnacious master of the American idiom. Such amazing works. . .provide all the evidence you need to link Lally with Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan. . . .” 

—David Lehman

“…Finally if you just wanna talk about Lally as a poet, he’s a sonneteer. A guy with a lute. A maker of that precise little form that spawns so many multiples of itself.”

—Eileen Myles