Negativity's Kiss is a noir poem, with characters and a story, violence, cops, everything one likes about the crime novel, minus its robotic, skippable detail. Plus language that rocks.
However the poet doesn't know how to be straight enough to just do it-tone and genre-so this is pretty crooked. Satirical and feral, written at the time of Hurricane Katrina.
The world of the poem is an international city that slides- everything slides-between being like Paris and being like New York. But maybe it's more like Gotham City, where everyone knows everyone, and even a poet can be in the media spotlight, if someone tries to kill her. . .