In this powerful, lucid poems, Allison Joseph looks unflinchingly at the chronic angers of an unromanticized urban childhood. The vividly rendered neighborhoods of In Every Seam unfold before us, showing us how the young are taught over and over that the glittering, sparkling, dazzling things of the world are beyond their grasp. But Joseph, a survivor of these neighborhoods, brilliantly disproves these lessons. In Every Seam is literally a triumph . Maura Stanton Like all good literature, the poems in Allison Joseph`s In Every Seam explore the common yet complex notion of what it`s like to be a human being. These poems take a close-up look at the particular world of the author -- a black woman who grew up in an America which refused, again and again, to see her as a person first, a black person second . Andrea Hollander Budy