In the opening poem of her plain speaking, no punches pulled collection, Fortune Cookie, Dianne Borsenik warns us:

Some cities spit dust.
Some cities swallow without chewing first,

But this is the voice too of a poet fully in love with her home, and she sets the record straight at the close of “Got Soul?”:

My city slaps you on the back,
offers you a brew, says
come on in, willya, and wipe your feet, and
welcome to the neighborhood.

And Borsenik does just that, welcoming us to her neighborhood of greater Cleveland in the literary and spoken word tradition of the town, belting out its praises and never shrinking from the gritty landscape flocked with poets and ghosts and the whole crazy quilt of rust belt denizens.