"Cynthia Cruz's passionate, intense poems inhabit a landscape of fates and fatal hungers, nightmares and dangerous desires, in which enchantment and terror are so intimate that they become one."-Reginald Shepherd Reader, take heed: These are no ordinary poems about childhood. In a series of secular prayers, Cynthia Cruz alludes to a girlhood colored by abuse and a brother's death. A beautifully understated sense of menace and damage pervades this vivid, nonlinear tale. "January"A California of snow and the surpriseOf illness. I throned myself in the whiteNoise of its silence and watched as the worldFell away. All the silver flickerings of possibilityGoing out like the sound of horse hoovesClicking into the distance. It is almost The end. Anesthesia of medicine and me, Beneath its warm bell of milk. My girlhood wasMicroscopic: a locked window overlooking theSea. An atlas of the disaster: an un-lit hall andA shift in the waves of the field. Blue bedsidePorcelain. Michelle, my little sister, silent asA weed. I took all the things I loved andSmashed them one by one.