Poetry. "A collection whose distinction rests in structure: Rhodes cleaves to no fixed perspective-this is a single speaker, eccentric, various, rather than a spokesperson. This fluidity persuades because it mimics the dilemma, imitates and preserves the child's helplessly reactive mind as it survives into, and is masked by, adulthood. These short poems, by turns savage, wry , mordantly witty, tender, stern, deluded, sane, read like a series of fragments, bits of mosaic; they duplicate on the page the sense of a past's being, piece by piece, recovered; they convey, devastatingly, the moment of a pattern's emerging: the little scenes and vignettes, the suspect tools of memory, cohere heart-stoppingly and absolutely into a narrative which fuses the damaged body to the divided heart. The results of the forbidden saturate these poems; reading them we are in the presence of harm. and, simultaneously, a wild, stubborn, unkillable life"-Louise Gluck.