Nagbe begins from the assumption of the fear which many students develop for reading, understanding, and intelligently discussing poetry. He lays out a thesis that poetry ought not to be as frightening as it may seem--thus, his attempt to "clip" the "deadly claws" of poetry. Using poems by Althea Romeo-Mark and Edwin Barclay, Nagbe explains basic techniques required to analyze poetry. Two of those techniques are first to see each poem as a structure which can be transformed into sentence instead of line units, and two to transform each poem into "story-like" units, calling paraphrasing.