<DIV><p>Valerie Bandura's clean, crafted, headlong-into-the-breach poems are scary in their intensity. They are full of the violence of history, and Europe, and family, and motherhood, and bodies, and fate. Reader, there is a little of hell in them, and a ferocious desire for truth, which is to say, their speaker is engaged is the brave, sometimes appalling struggle to turn into a human being. <I>Freak Show </I>is a terrific book."?Tony Hoagland, author of <I>What Narcissism Means to Me</I></p><p><B>Valerie Bandura </B>received degrees from Columbia University and Warren Wilson College, where she served as the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow.</p></DIV>