This wide-ranging, beautiful, and painful book reveals LaWanda Walters as a masterful, brave, and dangerous poet. As much at home with a disciplined free verse as with traditional forms, and as comfortable with narrative as with lyric, Walters delivers (like the morning mail, like a baby) a world. The odalisque is light-meaning not heavy, meaning luminous. "How odd," we discover, "that a direction-like South-takes on meaning like a person's face." The poems are (or appear to be) autobiographical in the best sense. "I searched myself," Heraclitus declared, and Walters's book, written in that spirit, stokes the Heraclitean fire with embers from a burning heart. -T.R. Hummer, author of Skandalon: Poems