Cate Marvin's new poems, their wrought music, unblinking focus, and hard-edged sensuality, are wreathed with an entirely different silence than her first collection. The brokenness and loss of the fragmented queen-seeming to rise up through centuries-is their tutelary spirit.

Cate Marvin is the author of World's Tallest Disaster, awarded the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize by Robert Pinsky and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award (2002). She teaches creative writing in Staten Island, New York.