The freshness of these poems flows from a passionate edginess, combined with a rich lyric range. Adams is afraid of nothing. In the opening poem a father, whose dying mother didn’t kiss him because she thought she was contagious, can’t kiss his fourteen year old daughter because she is “too beautiful and vulnerable”:

     The one not kissed thinks she is bad
     or he is angry, feels for no reason
     she is dying or he is dying
     and won’t say.

It is like that with these poems: they visit great pain in its myriad forms, yet do so with redeeming compassion.  

Adams’ long poems, like “Cincinnati River Aubade,” are ambitious, even epical, and open the kind of space with which the poet can

     …become one of the dreams risen in the a black mist
     on the flowing stealth of waking water, 
     ebbing outward from the reeds
     hair-washing in the backwaters…

In these poems Adams stakes his claim to be the new American Adam, and his bona fides is an eye and ear that perceive and shape with the double perception of innocence and experience. Reading Adams’ poems is like riding with him on his Harley, “footpeg scraping sparks from the concrete….”