“He is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard who dislikes elitism, a newly minted member of a Republican administration who speaks a Whitmanesque language of populism and free expression. Gioia is also a poet who dresses like the successful businessman he once was (before retiring to be a full-time writer), and his poetry is as immaculate as his suit. Yet there is a strange dissonance between a man in a tie and a mind capable of imaginative excursions into the head of a young killer or the heart of a lonely woman. It’s glib, however, to say he’s a man of contradictions.”