Riffing through the canon of jazz greats from Charlie Parker and John Coltrane to Ornette Coleman, Plumpp's Ornate With Smoke comes the closest to a saxophone solo-in-verse as you're likely to read. --Publishers Weekly. A tribute to the creativity and emotional power of a jazz master, Ornate With Smoke also exemplifies a poet's restless questioning of America and himself. Plumpp creates as free, as inventive, as surprising, as masterful a passage through our language as Coltrane did through scales and changes. This is a beautiful, astonishing book. --Reginald Gibbons.