“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 surprise Of illness. I throned myself in the white Noise of its silence and watched as the world Fell away. All the silver flickerings of possibility Going out like the sound of horse hooves Clicking into the distance. It is almost The end.

Anesthesia of medicine and me, Beneath its warm bell of milk. My girlhood was Microscopic: a locked window overlooking the Sea. An atlas of the disaster: an un-lit hall and A shift in the waves of the field. Blue bedside Porcelain. Michelle, my little sister, silent as A weed. I took all the things I loved and Smashed them one by one.