leader, and a single female, whose power within the pack is self-determined and basically unlimited, often superseding that of the leader. These women, needless to say — Anthony's (and, previously, Lark's) unnamed lover, a maelstrom of tenderness and vengeance; the surfer chick Annie, who moves, in one description, "as if fire had flesh"; a fearsome creature named Sasha ("kerosene and sugar/Barbed wire bent to make an angel"); and Lark's second girl, Maria, a firebrand given to "prodding the world, looking for/what will bite and what will tear" — are among the book's most fascinating characters. All the members of a pack live in the same house, sleep with the same woman and move strictly at the direction of their leader, bound by elemental undercurrents of loyalty and communityfrom the book's unlikely philosopher — one Mr. Venable: a small, white-haired fellow with a "lisp like a twister," companion to the hulking, silent Goyo, who is given to rambling existential sermons and ultimately serves as the sole moral witness to the book's savage crescendo.

"This is a violent city," Venable pronounces,

and I don't mean rapes and bloodshed.

I mean the existence of every ounce of it.

This entire vast urbanity was bludgeoned from the earth,

torn and wrought,

piece by piece. A thousand bricks.

A thousand tiles.

The concrete and the steel girders

all bitten out of the soil and the rock.

Then, of course, it's brought here,

to the desert, to death itself.

For all that, however, Barlow seems to find hope in what we build with those bricks and tiles — or with the less palpable