Rapture: Poems

plainly. Because I always stutter

politely. Because there's always the chatter

before the kiss.

—from "In Need of Subtitles"

In this award-winning debut, Sjohnna McCray movingly recounts a life born out of wartime to a Korean mother and an American father serving during the Vietnam War. Their troubled histories, and McCray's own, are told with lyric passion and the mythic undercurrents of discovering one's own identity, one's own desires. What emerges is a s...