aaMy stories / donat always sound so sweet, a says Danielle Montgomery in one of the poems herein. Sheas right. Tales of fugitive relatives, destitute swindlers and dangerous families populate her work. Writing bad checks and using denuded credit cards, Montgomery shows us what happens when the second paycheck in apaycheck-to-paychecka goes missing. She shows us the effects when basic needs are denied. And her poems insist on reminding us that "this too," is America, not American literature and that the line drawn between ausa and athema is a fiction, a lie we tell ourselves to keep ourselves safe. But none of us, as Montgomeryas work shows us, can ever be truly safe as long as we are human.a aDaphne Gottlieb, from the introduction