This wide-ranging, beautiful, and painful book reveals LaWanda Walters as a masterful, brave, and dangerous poet. As much at home with a disciplined free verse as with traditional forms, and as comfortable with narrative as with lyric, Walters delivers (like the morning mail, like a baby) a world. The odalisque is light-meaning not heavy, meaning luminous. "How odd," we discover, "that a direction-like South-takes on meaning like a person's face." The poems are (or appear to be) autobiographical in the best sense. "I searched myself," Heraclitus declared, and Walters's book, written in that...