The title sequence, "No Both," was begun on the 20th anniversary of the death of Michael Gizzi's father and concluded two months later, despite states of extreme agitation, on his mother's birthday.

Here, spring meshes with issues of first and second generation immigrant anxiety, blending memories of family loyalty and power (dutiful son meets the conflicts of poetic liberation), to throw these writings into the air, like wounded birds, where they streak and tumble, wired, weary, cuckoo, brilliant-finding literary form and personal redemption in bursts of uncanny verbal deliverance.

The second half of the book, "We See," poems since 1993, written for the most part under the influence of jazz and other musics, continues the assault on normative lyric pieties.