Entre chien et loup — between dog and wolf. This French colloquialism for twilight informs Jennifer Grotz’s debut poetry collection, Cusp. A winner of this year’s Bakeless Prize for poetry, Grotz explores the peculiar territory of middleness — neither dark nor light, not quite familiar but not fully unknown. It is a place with its own dangers, its own knowledge: road signs in a French tunnel remind drivers of their headlights in the temporary darkness; a scratchy recording of the last castrato highlights art’s uneasy coupling of inspiration and artifice. Personal, thoughtful, inquisitive, and introspective, these poems reveal Grotz’s varied influences, from the “quilted fields” of west Texas to a jazz club in Paris, from a sexy rodeo rider to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the dizziness of the foreign and the strangeness of what’s all around that gives Cusp its energy, its vitality, signaling the arrival of a distinctive new voice in American verse. Jennifer Grotz’s poems have appeared in Tri-Quarterly , Ploughshares , Black Warrior Review , New England Review , Best American Poetry 2000 , and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry and MA in english at Indiana University in 1996, and completed her BA at Tulane University in 1993. She has received grants and scholarships from the Oregon Arts Commission, Literary Arts Inc., the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the National Society of Arts and Letters. She is also the author of Not Body , a limited edition letterpress chapbook, published in 2001 by Urban Editions. She teaches English and creative writing at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and at the University of Rochester, where she is associate professor. Between Two Road Signs in Northern Territory Allumez vos phares the road sign warns as I enter the tunnel, where nighttime robs the day, speeding nighttime. A kilometer later a sign will remind me Vos phares? but for this instant, litter scrapes and flutters across the ground and I am thinking of the exit into daylight, it fools me every time, sunlight a harsher seduction than the gleaming eyes of cars rippling behind. Overhead lights stream geometric shadows that could be pines. In the center of the tunnel where entrance disappears, I have no choice. The story is the same backward and forward so the story is not the point. And the tunnel whispers go down, it whirs and hums. It is the projector’s hiss, the seat that reclines. I drive deep into the now of the tunnel: after the light behind recedes my dashboard glows, intricate, boxed in glass. I dare not interrupt, I spend my fire . . . The Floating World The huge quick bursts of light grow like time lapse photography and dissolve into darkness and embers trailing into black water. I will find you here, sudden as fireworks blooming above the river, the light rail blurring through the empty street, past the grand hotels along the waterfront, where you stand momentarily breathless amid brass and thick carpet, I know this, while bellboys rake the vast ashtrays, stamping the hotel insignia on white sand. Amid the corrosive rain of fireworks, I wonder who would ever leave you. Who could bear to bloom and fade from you? Earlier in sunlight we found a demolished building between two skyscrapers. A boom truck, yellow and toy-like, balanced on the collapsed floors, everything coated with the fine pink dust of crumbled brick. I know an anchor must be here, amid the world floating with all its lights and teases, the carnival spread out like a strip mall along the river, the highways forming concrete orbits, tracing the many paths we’ve taken to arrive. The parking lot off Burnside fills with the Japanese woodblock of the King of Hell surrounded by his Attendants. The anxiousness of people waiting for the bus. Finding now is the cult of the floating world, but now we are so poisoned and drowsy from perfume and fear. Even my body behaves like a question increasingly impatient at no answer. I am the firefly catcher in the woodblock where my mistress in her starry robe holds a fan and paper lantern with two crooked pinkies as I lunge for the veined night sky with hand raised to graspmoonlight’s clichéd now at the haloed black insects, five of them lazily floating. The Last Living Castrato Difficult to believe, a knife ensures the voice, soprano notes proceed intact while chest hair and beard accompany the new lower octaves, the voice expanding beyond sex, limited only by lung. And now whole operas composed for castrati are abstract and unperformable, now whole species of off-humans who were sacrificed for air, for air sinking and rising in their throats, are extinct, now facsimiles reproduce for our ears what is digital mastery, bleeding soprano and countertenor. Except for the brief miracle of Edison’s recording: the last living castrato’s voice brimming through static and hiss. Technology at its beginning and old-school opera at its decline, that cusp between where