Cruz, poet, and singer, creative, receptive and sensitive, knows about the essentiality of form in word and sound, in the visible and the tangible. He does not disdain what appears small or insignificant, because he sees the great in the small. The sounds and signs of which this poetry is formed become the vehicles of meaningful forces. The Beast is We is a dense, erudite, wide-ranging collection couched in the language of everyday speech that has been transformed by the poet Dennis Cruz into language that is magical, visionary and brutal in its unflinching look at the reality of being human. - Richard Modiano - from his introduction