Transformation is found in story and spirit: “I am Dorothy… the legs of my past shrivel and curl away into black grass.”

A dollhouse becomes a place where an adult child peers back through the windows of her own past — “heads of little dolls… shoes blood red… furniture glued in place.”

She writes her adolescence exactly as she lived it: dangerous, unprotected, and bewildering. “Machine guns slid under the seats in front of us” in a black SUV; “two glossy bodies moving” in a mansion room; the fluorescent hum of a mall food court vibrating with “greasy cheese making me sweat.”

Her brilliant mind makes stunning collages of experience — “the smell of my grandparents’ house in New Haven… a glass of cold Ovaltine,”

“trees like the lines of pens scratching out a secret” — images and sensations toing and froing, combining to move and grip us, compelling us to think critically about what it means to be human.

Even her smallest pieces carry a stripped back emotional force, as in the quiet revelation of “Sunlight—an elusive God, completely hidden except inside a velvet heart.”