San Francisco poet and musician, Kevin Simmonds, trained as classical singer but grew up in jazz, blues and gospel-drenched New Orleans. His poems travel the distance from a southern spiritual's lamentation to gay men in a Bangkok sex club to competitive hot dog eating. With tender expansiveness that Jane Hirshfield says calls to mind "Whitman's America's future" and his "unquestionable sense of music" (Kwame Dawes), Simmonds readily turns to assess what causes others consternation, shame and fear: be it sexual abuse, racism, organized religion or sexual mutilation. In considering all our lives and circumstances, he meditates on the apple tree: "crouched down as if something brutal had happened / for the sweetness to come."