Morning Constitutional // Michael Magee Original version. Purchase at SPD. 1-889793-09-4 [ISBN]	Poetry. "As the title of his book suggests, Michael Magee's poetry buzzes with the legislative, polemical, and liberatory static of American political history: specifically the declarative rhetoric of the founding fathers (from Jefferson and Franklin to Woodward and Bernstein) and its slow refraction into the 'sacred word' of mediaspeak, multicultural cant, and all the cynically mediated chatter that masks the 'historindustry of worlds.' This is social poetry, very serious about its engagement with public discourse, but anarchically ornery in its playful paronomastic splintering...a funked-up powerwalk, an essential dance mix that is not just infectious, but informed" -- K. Silem Mohammad. "Morning Constitutional would see the awareness of irony as a conduit between an instance and its articulation. In Magee's politics, the tit 'n' tat of market-based democracy creates certain ironies that precede their identification through language. In this way, articulating irony identifies inequities among us, thereby subverting the power structure that births/exists through these inequities*Magee's best work occurs in shotgun unions that prove atonally harmonious, where the poet acts as a slap-happy Justice of the Peace for singles-nite divorcees who had the papers signed (ink still wet) by Baudrillard...the associations are alive and popping (feverishly)." -- SLOPE (WWW.SLOPE.ORG) A breadcrumb trail of juiced urban monologues, phrasal runs somewhere between Dolphy and Sun Ra, rope-a-dope reports from "a guarded ordering bordering on an underdog's corner restoration" and definitional clarity ("A slush fund is dirty money") mark these ante meridian outings, exercising our rights and outlining the space between our laws...vital, acessible and engaging. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY