Wherewithal

Poetry. California Interest. Music. "In the eary 90's hordes of gifted young experimental writers met and gathered in the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in a few years of making work that, were I more given to hyperbole, I would term a veritable galvanic, miraculous, reinvention of poetry! And Adam DeGraff, then a Berkeley grad student, was among the principal players. Hard to believe, but this volume of selected poems is his very first book. It's been long in the making, yet will please fans old and new, overflowing as it does with linguistic and musical invention, and an elliptical, hard-earned wisdom. Reading the poems of WHEREWITHAL one can't help realizing that all those years ago DeGraff started writing for tomorrow, a moment that's almost upon us now; he has prepared us for eventuality, for event, not for beauty alone, but for tears as well."—Kevin Killian