In her debut poetry collection, Carmen GimA(c)nez Smith illuminates Latina identity in the prismatic light of postcolonial history, feminism, myth, and the fragmentation of modernity. From these disparate elements she fashions a female personaaaclairvoyant with great shoesaawho is both bracingly modern and movingly vulnerable. Through her poems we traverse the landscape of a womanas life (girl, mother, lover), navigating a terrain tinted with mythology and relic yet still fresh and uncharted. The poems revolve around issues of identityaand the ways in which identity is both inherited and constructed/reconstructed. Or, as one poem puts it, aThe planet floating backwards / whirling some of us older than the stars, some of us nascent and bare.a Although she employs techniques of avant-garde poetry, GimA(c)nez Smith shades and deepens the New World landscape into a territory of rare lyric intensity and energy. Humorous, sly, sexy, sophisticated, these poems are animated by passion and hard-won knowledge. In these poems we encounter such strange beauties as a girl assembling and disassembling, a moth trapped in a glass of water, new-age fairy godmothers, and a lark who sings for the milkman. Yet we are also made aware of how these beauties reflect the speakeras troublesaher effort to employ, in the words of one of her most memorable poems, aOnly the invisible post where she writes the encounters / with airas lusters. Only the imagined hour / with which sheas made a fragile craft.a Vivid and charged with an inner light, these are poems that linger and expand in the mind and memory.