John Giorno dissects the American consciousness. With his scalpel he cuts through the layers that collectively make up America, and his poems expose all the vileness and beauty. His metaphors are the hells of heroin, the hungry ghosts of trashy pornography, the animals of hamburger cattle, the titans of B-52 bombers, the Gods of the cheap thrills of consummate bliss, and the human voice trying to figure out its own suffering.

Written during the two year period of the growth and removal of the author’s cancerous tumor, the poems in this book bear a relation to the sick body that wrote them and to the country in which than body became sick. “The images are American cancer cells,” Giorno states in his preface, “The poems are a biopsy. The reality of cancer transformed into words. The cause of suffering in the American body.”