In City Full of Fireworks & Blues Stephen Cramer collects a series of lyric poems that explore both love and loss with a taut musicality that enters the reader's very musculature. Though the book often features the emotional or intellectual skirmishes that are common to all, it is far more of a celebration than a dirge. "Let us learn," one of the poems offers, "the way cries inherit our breath, the way 1,000 facets of song can inhabit the mouth."