RaveThe New York Times...McGrath knows the ins and outs of appetite as deeply, and as thoroughly, as he knows the highways and byways of America. He has spent decades exploring both. Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems is a rich and invigorating sampling of the poetic results of these explorations ... Like Whitman, like America, McGrath ranges in his work from the beautiful to the brash, from the expansive to the intimate ... He has, it seems, been pretty much everywhere in this country, and he is nearly peerless in his ability to capture the character, tastes and textures of particular regions and locales. Tastes and textures are particularly salient here. America’s essence, for McGrath, is grounded in those conceptually conjoined twins, consumption and hunger ... A former punk musician, McGrath feels a deep affection for the joyful raucous stupidity of rock music; refreshingly, he isn’t ashamed to say so in a poem.