"Like a voyage to the Portuguese islands of the title, the poems in Azores arrive at their striking and hard-won destinations over the waters of experience. The ever-present and uncomfortable realities of envy, lust, and mortality haunt the book from poem to poem. Yezzi does not shy away from frank assessments of desire and human failing, the persistent difficulties of which are relieved periodically by a cautious optimism and even joy. By turns plain-spoken, caustic, evocative, and wry, these poems are, in matters of form, well-wrought and musical and, in matters of the heart, clear-eyed and always richly human."--Jacket.