This memoir is not your traditional story-told-in-words, although there are gripping excerpts that recount a midnight shooting and the dreams that foretold it, as well as interviews that introduce in depth the painter/poet, subject of the book, and explore her post-trauma road to recovery. Nor is it your average book of paintings, although there are over sixty paintings, prints, and cartoons to peruse. The paintings, like the memoir passages, grip the viewer with great intensity; they are mostly portraits, the kind that do not just represent but bring the viewer into the living presence of a...