In Beautiful Laceration, Gina Rae Foster's latest work, one finds each poem inevitable and necessary, being lyric declarations from an intimate world animated by mythic power and high emotional stakes, sometimes highly personal yet reticent in autobiography, chthonic, and always erotic and charged, thirsting for love. Though written with an astute economy of diction, her poems nonetheless permit themselves astonishing elegances of phrasing, shy eloquences poised against the powerful ache of an unending feeling mixed with doubt and desire. There is global travel here intermingled with domestic intimacy, the mundane bits of life illumined with the alabaster of lyric vision, and precise romantic insights that emerge from her seemingly daily meditations, not quite transformative, but yet thrilling as a needle of light that you notice making its way toward you just before it dies.