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Joanna Rawson's poems tend toward the immediate, her shattered narratives describing a landscape that is swollen and overripe, ready to burst. These are violent poems, not in the sense of voyeurism or titillation, but in terms of a society on the brink of coming apart: the detonation of the pastoral, erotic affairs heading for annihilation, transcendence laced with despair and resignation.Rawson's poems often take their cue from political events such as the riots after the Rodney King verdict, carpet bombings on various landscapes, refugee camps, and crack-house raids, while still others respond to specific paintings and photographs, Rawson approaches her narratives with a reporter's eye and writes of the multitudes of men and women displaced or in exile, lovers who recognize themselves on TV soundbites and advertisements, alienated figures with no way back into the community that cast them out. Rawson will not let us turn away from the violence of our time and of our making -- forcing us to experience both the ecstasy and exhaustion of being alive in contemporary America.