De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman... each was a walker and a city dweller, a collagist and a chronicler. They spent their lives picking the detritus of their eras off the filthy streets and assembling it into something new, shocking, and beautiful. The author walks the length of Manhattan and beyond, and assembles overheard conversations, subway ads, commercials blazing away on public screens, snatches from books hurriedly packed into bags or shoved under one's arm, mundane anxieties, and the occasional true flash of insight into a poem of contemporary life: an invitation to let oneself be carried along by the sheer energy of the digital metropolis. -- adapted from jacket