Bøker av Stephen Cramer

In City Full of Fireworks & Blues Stephen Cramer collects a series of lyric poems that explore both love and loss with a taut musicality that enters the reader's very musculature. Though the book often features the emotional or intellectual skirmishes that are common to all, it is far more of a celebration than a dirge. "Let us learn," one of the poems offers, "the way cries inherit our breath, the way 1,000 facets of song can inhabit the mouth."

The Hot Sauce Madness Love Burn Suite is a book of poems that revolves around the beloved and sometimes notorious culture of hot sauce and hot peppers. Its 814 rhyming couplets delve deeply into that rich and addicting world, whether they focus on peppers' flavor, pain, linguistics, or history. Come take a bite out of these verses, and see if you can handle the heat.1912: pharmacist Wilbur Lincoln Scoville first measured the "heat" of peppers(the word's in quotes because there's no actual heat in this equation, just spiciness, which hoodwinks our bodies into thinking physical flames are licking our tongues, throat, lips). Chilies aren't caliente, which implies heat from an actual fire, but picante, the word weuse for heat that arisesfrom spice.

"In The Disintegration Loops Stephen Cramer attempts to uncover the music within the world's dissolution and fragmentation, from Italian masters painting over the work of previous artists, to the innocence of childhood giving way to scars, to the description of badly stored tapes being looped and played over and over again until they begin to flake. In the last of the three, silence eats the music from the inside so that by the final loop, the listener hears not the soaring themes of the beginning, but an homage to loss and stillness. The book insists that music, and maybe even life itself, is made more dazzling and precious because it "falters/ & staggers/ forward. The broken/ melody limps & surges on.""--