As poetry editor of the New Yorker, Princeton professor, and Pulitzer Prize winner, Muldoon is so well known it would almost not be worth calling attention to him in a venue like this – except for the fact that he is an awesome poet who, after 40 years at the center of English letters, has not even begun to lose his edge. The Word on the Street is Muldoon’s 12th full length collection of poetry, and constitutes both an experiment in, and a return to, the lyric form. Embracing the essential meaning of the term lyric (“a short poem sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument”) many of the poems in The Word on the Street double as lyrics to rock songs performed by the Wayside Shrines, a Princeton-based music collective of which Muldoon is a member.