Poetry. Women's Studies. LA LIMINAL closely examines what lies beneath the "glatzy" spectacle of Los Angeles. Through the x-ray eyes of a failed Hollywood hopeful, with the advantage of distance and a sharp tongue, the reader gets a guided tour through an internalized, apocalyptic landscape. Transitional places and phases are imagined as both frightening and ripe, capable of producing a space where anxiety and creativity co-habit in the narrated realm of the speaker. Readers will enjoy the dryly personal tone, surprising refractions of language, acute sense of metaphor, and humor. Armed with these, Becca Klaver's probing meditations and acerbic wit poke a careful hole through the scummy, glittering surface, to put a cocktail-ringed finger right on the humanity beneath it, until LA functions not just as synecdoche for country and national identity, but becomes a trope for personal identity, and more specifically, a feminine identity rebuilt from the wreckage of failure.
