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A short poem about becoming comfortable with one's identity as a liberated black woman.

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A Kiowa Native-American, so obese he looks "like a grand piano in soft sculpture," visits the narrator's office. The Kiowa is a teacher and lover of words, but back home on the reservation, the old sources of inspiration are gone--"the old stories disappear"--and he knows "at the center of himself he is starving." (The obesity comes from this desperate need for feeding!) The narrator, who is probably a writer and teacher herself cannot help him.

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This 15-line poem considers how, through the ages, dwarves have been ridiculed. Something about their appearance makes us, in our "big, proper bodies" laugh at them. We "snicker" at the immensely obese as well, even as we are aware of the danger to their health. Then the narrator takes us one step further: "And imagine the small political base / of a fat dwarf."

In the final stanza, the "we" becomes restricted to the narrator and his friends, who are socializing over dinner and can "hardly contain" themselves. But does that let the rest of us--the complicitous larger audience--off the hook?

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This poem by physician, Rafael Campo, is No. 5 in the sequence, "Canción de las Mujeres" ("Song of the Women"). A drag queen is dying of AIDS, as she and the physician try to maintain her dignity and her identity. "Her shade of eye shadow was emerald green; / She clutched her favorite stones."

The patient is resigned, "almost at peace" while she remembers the strength that she drew from the community of drag queens who were her friends, now dead. The physician turns up the morphine drip, and straightens her wig, "[b]efore pronouncing her to no applause."

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The speaker is en route by plane from San Antonio to Mexico City to visit Mexican relatives on her father's side of the family. At the airport she had remembered that "in Mexico they don't like hair / under your arms . . . " and is struggling, before landing, to deal with this in the tiny bathroom, with a disposable razor hastily purchased at the airport.

Also before landing she has to negotiate a mix up over declaration forms--"the stewardess . . . has given me the wrong / one assuming I'm Mexican but I am! / and I have to run up the aisle and ask / for a U.S. citizen form instead because / I'm well how do I explain?" When she arrives in Mexico City she is ready for her relatives, "armpits clean as a newborn's soul" and presents herself "like the good girl my father would have them believe I am."

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The poem presents a Native-American woman hanging by her fingers from a window ledge 13 floors above the street. As she tries to decide whether or not she'll let go, she thinks of all the reasons that have led her to consider suicide: she feels broken in "several pieces between the two husbands she has had"; here in a crowded Chicago tenement, she is out of her natural native place in the north; she is poor; she suffers from racial discrimination; she hears voices; she cries "for lost beauty." She considers her three young children and remembers her own childhood. The poem ends with the either/or choice still not made--either she will fall to her death or she will climb back in the window and reclaim her life.

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The speaker conjectures on what it would be like to be white. Her question is a challenge and her examples are not flattering to whites. "I would forget my furs on any chair. / I would ignore the doormen at the knob . . . " and, finally, "I would do nothing. / That would be enough."

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The title of this collection of poems recalls the formulaic statement by which a physician introduces a patient's medical problem or chief complaint. For example, "The patient presents with a history of fever, abdominal cramps and diarrhea for the last 24 hours." Or, "The patient presents with a long history of hypertension and diabetes." In this case, though, Dr. White's patients' presentations are poems, rather than chunks of sanitized medical jargon; and, while the patient remains a key character in most of these works, they also present the doctor's story.

Domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual abuse figure prominently in these poems. In "365" (p. 1) a five year old girl presents with "a foul smelling vaginal discharge"; she was a victim of rape. Baby "John Brown" (p. 9) has 47 fractured bones and was "dipped in boiling water" for soiling himself. In "Ironing" (p. 18) a first grade girl has the impression of an iron burned into her thigh. And the two-year-old girl in "Peek" (p. 49) is admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) with cigarette burns and a liver fracture.

Dr. White also writes of babies left behind by their mothers ("Autumn Angels," p. 3), homeless mothers and children ("Numbers," p. 42), and complex multigenerational family pathology ("Riddle," p. 50). All in all, these stories carry the reader very close to "Looking at the Gates of Hell" (p. 32).

Yet, a still, small voice of calm, maybe even of salvation, can appear in the most unlikely places. In "Belly" (p. 4) the physician lays her face against a baby's belly and "the warm brown skin calms my forehead. / All stiffness melts." In "Maplewood & Greene" (p. 36) she revels in seeing "three little girls on roller skates." And in the Whitmanesque poem called "Oh" (p. 45), she gloriously affirms, "Oh to laughter, oh to sorrow / Oh to a better day, oh tomorrow."

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This is a collection of poems that ranges widely through both the geographical and spiritual worlds. Susan Rich began her career as a human rights activist and Peace Corps volunteer in Niger. She has also worked in South Africa, Bosnia, Gaza, and as a program coordinator for Amnesty, International. Her poems are lyrics of empathy, discontent, and hope, unified by her "Cartographer's Tongue."

From an international medical and health perspective, some of the best of these poems are "Haiti," "The Woman with a Hole in the Middle of Her Face," "In the Language of Maps," "The Toughest Job," "The Beggars," "Sarajevo," "La Verbena Cemetery," "Whatever Happened to the Bodies," and "The Scent of Gasoline."

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In this collection, Judith Arcana brings together her long-standing feminist activism, especially for reproductive health and abortion rights, and her gifts as a poet. Although Arcana's activism dates back to the early seventies, most of the poems in the book were written between 1998 and 2004. They draw from "the lives of women and girls I know or have simply encountered" (xi).

The collection is divided into four sections: "Separating argument from fact," "Information rarely offered," "Don't tell me you didn't know this," and "Here, in the heart of the country." Spoken in first, second, or third person, these poems evoke the myriad individual situations in which women of childbearing age become pregnant, and the trajectories their lives may take as a result.

The title of the collection derives from one of its poems ("What if your mother") and the related, immediately preceding poem, "My father tells me something, 1973" (6-7). Arguing back to those who confront her with, "What if your mother had an abortion? . . . they mean me," the speaker/poet answers, "then I say she did . . . . "What if, what if. / What's the point of asking this phony question?"

From the preceding poem, the reader has learned, along with the speaker listening to her father in 1973, that the poet's mother had an abortion in the Depression era, early in marriage. With this juxtaposition of poems we are introduced early in the book to the complexity of the issues surrounding pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion and to the timeline of a continuing national and personal debate. This complexity is the subject of the collection.

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