Poetry. The second Poet Laureate of San Francisco (following Lawrence Ferlinghetti), Janice Mirikitani is a poet of daily exchanges and lyrical observations. However, as she demonstrates in her Inaugural Address printed at the beginning of LOVE WORKS, her lyricism does not cause her to shy away from the politics of poetry: "I understood the power of the word, the power of language perhaps most graphically when my mother broke her silence of forty years about the World War II internment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry...She testified before the Commission on Redress in 1981 and sent her testimony to me in the mail. It was as if in finding her voice, she illumined the path to discover mine." The thirty new Mirikitani poems in LOVE WORKS will likewise illumine a path for readers of this open, lucid poet.