Crossing Tecumseh Street Author:Earl S. Braggs Poetry Earl S. Braggs’ Crossing Tecumseh Street is lively, vocal, and laced with an intelligent sense of humor. I enjoyed these poems. I am going to share some of them with my poetry workshop which meets this afternoon. --Billy Collins "For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things," Rilke advises, and i... more »n Crossing Tecumseh Street, Earl Braggs does that and more as he takes us on his time machine of a book through several dozen cities and places where characters from history, literature, pop culture and fiction intersect like a maze of city streets to form a unique and visionary location. But he doesn’t stop there, where most poets would be content, for this is an important book that explores the self, and the country that too often tries to suppress the self. Powered by an incantatory rhythm in the tradition of Whitman and a lyricism in the tradition of Toomer, Braggs uses the events of history as metaphors for the self’s larger visions. Playing off complex interpenetrations of presence and absence, here and there, now and then, he discovers, finally, "you walk always in the wrong direction until / you are soaked // into realizing there is no need to disappear." Both histo! rian and prophet, Braggs takes us across Tecumseh Street into a world of dazzling visions, enormous disappointments, and guarded hopes. I don’t think there’s another poet today who could give us all this.-- Richard Jackson« less