“What is and has always been needed is an honest, clear, loving voice. Earl Braggs’ Ugly Love (Notes from the Negro Side of the Moon) offers that. Pull up your favorite chair and cover your cold feet with your grandmother’s quilt and enjoy this wonderful read.”
—Nikki Giovanni
“For a long time I have not read such a passionately and gracefully written book of poetry as Earl S. Braggs’ House on Fontanka. Being an African American, he so deeply understands the suffering of Russia, as Pushkin’s grandson, inheriting Pushkin’s great gift of global compassion…. There is no guilt.”
—Yevgeny Yevtushenko
“Like Whitman, Braggs finds occasions for song everywhere. It is a rich, finely textured world full of surprises and insights. In Which Language Do I Keep Silent is a rich opportunity to experience this poet in all his powers.”
—James Tate
“Earl S. Braggs’ Walking Back from Woodstock is jaunty, heart-broken, fast-talking, and true.”
—William Matthews
“… these large, vivid, Kerouacian, music saturated poems. The reader is returned, through repetition’s felicities – the epic extension of the moment of composition – inward to our national soul.”
—Alice Notley
“Earl S. Braggs’ Crossing Tecumseh Street is lively, vocal, and laced with an intelligent sense of humor. I enjoyed these poems.”
—Billy Collins
“Hat Dancer Blue isn’t a conventional title for a book pf poetry, neither are these poems. For this writer, form comes from the outside in … strong stuff that matters, not the usual thing.”
—Marvin Bell
“In Hats, Braggs powerfully bears testimony of the country’s disenfranchised in rolling headlong cadences that aspire to the incantatory. They also register leaping exuberance, joy, spiritual yearning, and the majesty of enduring.”
—Lynda Hull
“Walking Back from Woodstock: No romanticism here, but a witnessing with wit and irony, with subtle wisdom that rises only out of the fire.”
—Christopher Buckley
“Powered by an incantatory rhythm in the tradition of Whitman …, Braggs takes us across Crossing Tecumseh Street into a world of dazzling visions, enormous disappointment and guarded hope.”
—Richard Jackson
“In Negro side of the Moon, Earl S. Braggs confronts the “problem of the color line” with lyrical ferocity and politically charged wit. In his new book, Braggs means to sing the whole story in a voice both manic and carefully packed with the freight we’re all obliged to carry—whether we know it or not. If, as Dr. King has said, the destiny of white people is inextricably bound to the destiny of Black people, Negro Side of the Moon is an invitation to all of us to wake the hell up and take a long [take those sunglasses of] at what ails the American psyche.”