Thought you knew what to think about poetry? Michael Lally’s <i>Lost Angels</i>—sexy, swaggering, sagacious—will make you think again. From the wider world of politics to the intimate scope of his own psyche, from sex to fame to what it means to be yourself, Lally’s voice will seduce you while the funk musicians backing him up (led by oldest son Miles) will keep you poised for the next revelation. Lally has been called “the Godfather of Poetry” by magazines, newspapers, and fellow poets. Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1942, youngest of seven in an Irish-American family of cops, priests, and politicians, Michael Lally started out playing piano and reading his poetry in coffeehouses and bars in the late 1950s and early ’60s. In 1962 he joined the Air Force, where he spent more than four years as an enlisted man, and later used the G.I. Bill to attend the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he helped take over the student government to pass a student bill of rights while running for sheriff of Johnson County, Iowa, on the Peace and Freedom ticket in 1968. During those years, he wrote the autobiographical South Orange Sonnets, which on publication led to a New York Poetry Center Discover Award in 1972. He has written more than 20 books of poetry and prose, including the long autobiographical poem My Life, which on his receiving his second National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award in 1981, was denounced as pornography on the floor of the United States Congress by politicians out to discredit and dismantle the NEA. His writing has also been featured in several films, including the narration for Drugstore Cowboy and the climactic speech in Pump Up the Volume, and his collection of poetry and prose, It’s Not Nostalgia, published by Black Sparrow Press, won the American Book Award in 2000. The live track on Lost Angels, the long poem March 18, 2003, was written for a reading on what turned out to be the eve of the invasion of Iraq—at the Paula Cooper Gallery in NYC, with Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, and Ann Lauterbach, and introductory remarks by Ramsey Clark. The poem has gone through three print editions, and is one of the most lyrical, insightful, and thought-provoking commentaries on America you’re likely to hear. So think again: check out Lost Angels.