Poetry. To enter these poems is to step into a baroque architecture whose ceiling has come down, dismantled in fragments and glittering dust. Look up, says the poet, to see the night these poems expose: 'In every black there is / violet. I am speaking to you, // violet. When you come to the / precipice of your life and sit / in the dark.' Here is the vertiginous danger and lure of the edge that marks the work of Gallagher. Her lines create a vibratory music between the austere and the rich excess of a night that can dampen our 'late morning' in this city aflame. Notice, she says, 'how the mouths of us grow large' to take in such a nectar.--Carolina Ebeid