The Memoir of Mona Lisa and Other Poems is a wonderfully ambitious and innovative book. An extraordinary work of the imagination, The Memoir of Mona Lisa' is a narrative of a woman who had been both tormented and adored, who manages to escape fate's tight bounds in order to pursue both work and love. This memoir is terrifying but also exhilarating. Like life itself it unfolds in ways that are unexpected, mysterious, challenging, and inspiring. This opening meditation on life and art is followed by poems in which intimacy animates consciousness in beautiful and surprising ways.-Jim Moore