The debt

When not clumsily throwing around "diachronic" and "synchronic" like a freshman, or offering up semi-digested histories of jazz and blues that quote all too liberally from Sterling Brown, finally Thomas has nothing to say about the poetry itself. [...]he quotes "Jordantown Blues," a harrowing take on dysfunctional love that accomplishes its work with bracingly compressed lines like While life sags to extremes, blood streams, pinched, squeezed, By his diet of white Tory rum, pig tails, And her diet of fear, tea, and aspirin.