A D Winans has been around the blocks of San Francisco streets for over a generation as a witness to the changes that mark a society of consumerism gone amok with wars and the many desolations resulting from the contradictions, hypocrisies and downright injustices of a society living at the height of both compassion and decadence. There is a celebration in these poems of the figures of San Francisco streets, the 'characters' that have been sacrificed to the system and yet have resisted final destructions. And at the centre of all the highs and lows of Winans' discordant narrative and, at times lyric moments composed of biting images of his wanderings, geographically or physically, are his genuine praise-songs to the fellow street-poets who have helped to shape his own gritty style.