Carol Lynne Knight Knihy

When the ex-wife of an ex-cop with a penchant for TV detectives speculates about her own disappearance, the result is the poems in "If I Go Missing".

The title, A Fretted Terrain, Like Mars , refers to a deserted gravel parking lot of a popular bar at 4 a.m. These poems are wild, sensual, funny, wise, dancing, fretting, longing -- a travelogue of desire with rendezvous in cheap motels or the stratosphere, on mountain sides and deserts, in London and Paris. A couple learns the tango, a kite breaks its tether, a body speaks and its owner protests, a body breaks and somehow heals. The language is lush and surprising, the imagery rich and abundant.