Visits From The Seventh

A highly original poetic debut. In the mystical tradition of Merrill and Yeats, these wry, haunting poems take the form of conversations between a woman and a throng of invisible presences -- "visitors," as she calls them -- who counsel, challenge, cajole, and comfort her. Together they murmur about destiny, sex, the moon, an abortion, a walk on park Avenue. Exploring otherness, solitude, and desire, the "visits" are quixotic debates about the nature of language, art, and one woman's particular world. "Life is so complicated for us here, " she remarks, . . . that I wondered how they found theirs. Did they love it up there cutting their spirals into cold fronts andturning somersaults with the storms? Did they nestle cozy into their troughs of air, basking in the serene and glossy heights, the breathtaking vistas of blue-gray seas, the pink-tinted cloudscapes, the high music -- Or did they, as we do, long for blanketsand warm bodies?Exquisitely paced, full of delicate banter, Visits from the Seventh is a passionate and philosophically profound collection of poems.

The most comprehensive book on this subject ever published. With 3,638 references,

It doesn’t pay to be an outspoken Jewish girl in a small Southern town, battling drug-dealing cops, a corrupt judge and backstabbing lawyers. Star, a brash young public defender, is charged with murdering the judge presiding over the biggest trial of her career. Randleman County, North Carolina is a frontier mix of homegrown trouble and imported woe on the Cape Fear River. Racial tensions flare when a white deputy sheriff kills an unarmed Lumbee Indian boy. The District Attorney declares the shooting accidental. The deputy's patrol car explodes in front of the courthouse. Jimmy Ray Oxendine, a Lumbee, and explosives expert, is charged. Star is appointed to represent Jimmy Ray, a man some proclaim to be a political prisoner. There’s another explosion. Presiding Judge Owen Otis O'Brien, nicknamed Death Row O for sending so many men to the death chamber, dies in his canary yellow Lincoln Town Car on the second day of Jimmy Ray’s trial. This time Star is charged with murder. Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers, and the Supreme Court (Univ. of Illinois Press 1992)