Proper poetry never goes out of style, and Sage Francis is, no doubt, a poet. The Rhode Island MC earned his reputation with a molten mixtape and then went on to win several battles. So with three albums and years of touring proving his hip-hop prowess, what makes this album (his fourth, and second for Epitaph) poetic is his verse-thoughtfully constructed, tangential (yet always to the point), and never reaching for words just to hear himself flow. But most of all, it’s his honesty; “I know you much better than you think I do,” he raps, but the more he reveals about himself, the more you find that he knows about humankind.