Perdomo has one foot on each side of the dividing line between: poetry written for the page and poetry written for the stage. These two major fronts of the poetry world often seem to have incompatible practices, different audiences and very different values and standards. There are, of course, many very successful crossover artists: Patricia Smith began in the slam scene and has become a highly lauded literary poet; Thomas Sayers Ellis, predominantly a "paper" poet, is among the finest performers of poetry on or off any stage; Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery poetry club and one of the emcees of the slam community, belongs anywhere he wants to be.
Perdomo himself is another successful crossover, but this book occasionally suffers from a problem common among poets who are used to working in front of a live audience: sometimes, there simply aren't enough words on the page. Perdomo leaves details out, counting on his own spoken inflection to fill in the gaps. A love poem addressed to Shorty contains this passage:
I saw you post up in halls
and lobbies, parks and
churches, start hobbies
you couldn't pay balances on.
I choose not to count all the places
where we found ourselves broken
for the calling we couldn't hear,
the heard that went undone.