"When you open this book, expect serious role-playing and syntactic tap dancing. <i>The City She Was</i> presents a world that brings 'the horizon line into your lexicon' and a poet's muse ('The Endangered You') is lent to a friend and returned 'a little more frayed.' Giménez Smith muddles and enchants with her many masks, leaving the ground a little less stable under our feet." --Matthea Harvey, author of <i>Modern Life</i>, <i>Sad Little Breathing Machine</i>, and <i>Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form</i> <p>"The human body has only five senses but <i>The City She Was</i> reroutes the architecture of experience so effectively that the reader is awarded a new unnamed sense, a soft power, one that reprioritizes our outdated reality with the gathering infrastructure of the geography of language. The whole aggressive world is this book's only enemy, and no one tricks absurdity into form, reality into abstraction, injustice into stylized verdict, and contemporary popular culture into a useful, heroic trap of surreal-her-wholeness like Carmen Giménez Smith."--Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of <i>Skin, Inc.</i> and <i>The Maverick Room</i>