An inmate on Florida's death row writes piercingly of incarceration, racism and growing up.

Stephen Todd Booker, an inmate on Florida's death row, writes piercingly of incarceration. But he also sings, in a voice at once jagged and polished, of racism in Brooklyn and the South and of growing up black in 20th-century America, as he examines his life experience with metaphors that test the limits of language.

"Poems like nothing ever done before. In an act of spontaneous craft Booker distinguishes between idiom, vernacular, and diction, giving us a hard-wrought and complex language-a match for his ideas. Tug is a personal odyssey . . . It will make its mark in the world"-- Hayden Carruth.