The poems in Maya J. Sorini's The Boneheap in the Lion's Den take us inside the intense and often gruesome world of a hospital trauma unit, a milieu both surreal and (often) deadly real. Sorini never looks away from the hard stuff-in fact, the hard stuff is where she starts-but her gorgeous, precise lines and rhythms make this book unputdownable, despite the human instinct to look away. I finished this book grateful and changed. -Lynn Melnick