I don't normally attribute much personality or merit to the fixture of stars in these reviews. All too often a star becomes a soap box for someone's personal agenda. I am just as guilty of this kind of rigmarole as the worst I've seen so I try not to judge. All the same stars are a grouping of tripe. Really I only aspire to punctuate a review with stars as a way to adjust the base average of a book. So the truly exceptional or horrible are really the ones in which I am being the most honest, the 1 and 5 star ratings. However I vacillated on this one between 3 and 4. I suppose that was the point of the previous diatribe. To explain why I vacillated over the miserly manner in which I moderated this posting. To be fair I loved this book and it is peppered with post it notes for quick reference back to the many poems that I find to be inspirational, contagious like a pop song, jagged with juice, or ana-rhythmic in such a way as to make me take especial notice. However, though I'm not a poet and I never aspire to be, I have to say that a goodly portion of this book was suffused with mediocre poetry or personal favorites of the author. I could be wrong and this could in fact represent the best of a generation but for me it was mainly hard to read, harder to swallow, and I ended up skimming whole passages at times because I was so frickin bored. If you're a poet or even just a fan of this genre of poetry than this is the book for you, absolutely. Otherwise, pass it by. Though there are a few gems that remind us why poetry is a weapon, many of these literary pieces are merely water pistols hidden in the pocket of amateur muggers.