What is Wen Kroy? It is New York spelled backwards, and when people come to the city in their youth, how can it be anything but? Through these poems, we come to love and understand the hardships of being young and the difficulty of building a self. Sheila Black uses the city as a character in the discovery of a self through love, passion, fear, and, in the end, empathy. -Jennifer Bartlett Some poets blindfold themselves to better see in the dark, others bravely face the day. Sheila Black is one of those. Big-hearted, generous, all-embracing, the poems in her stunning new book Wen Kroy awake us to a world where the ordinary is "radiant, transfigured" and at the furthest frontiers of experience "pain shines like pleasure." - L. S. Asekoff Enter here Black's ghost-city held up to a mirror, her heart (your heart) on her lap like a terrible red baby. From the velvet, smoky hush of a room the moon is in and straight out into the streets and vacant lots and snow, Black spares us no thing. or Here is ruin and the blue-edged shadow we cling to, Lou Reed or Billy Bang playing the darkness. How I love the rage and tenderness in this voice. Indeed, "nothing but simple aria and/ the glass breaks." -Joni Wallace This is a fantastic book. Sheila Black is a master of metaphor. In "First Love" she transforms loneliness into "a raincoat pricked with so many holes." These poems speak expertly of desire, difference and danger. Wen Kroy captures "all the motley messy details / of daily life" with spontaneity and verve. - Jillian Weise Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq (both CW Press). She co-edited with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), named a 2012 Notable Book for Adults by the American Library Association (ALA). In 2012, she received a Witter Bynner Fellowship, for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, Texas where she directs Gemini Ink, a literary arts center.