Swans, owls, and other urban birds soar through the poems in Iris Lee's first collection taking the reader along with them as she covers a broad range in her exploration of the interiors and exteriors of her much-loved New York City. From descriptions of city streets to the Atlantic shores, to a lazy morning in bed with a lover, Lee delves into distances both temporal and spatial, connections both erotic and familial, and moments that are both ecstatic and dreadful all the while sustaining a frank, intense, and lyrical voice-which kicks ass when needed.

Unlike taking the summated scores of the survey items onto the Likert scale as in many other studies, this study adopted the estimation of teachers latent attitudinal traits via the RateFOLD (Luo & Andrich, 1999) program. Factor analysis thereafter revealed first three factors that contributed to some 67% of the total variance. Teachers subject matter knowledge was found to be the most important factor. Implications from this study were also discussed for the teachers, schools and for national recruitment.