Ravishankar and her illustrator collaborators distinguish their work by sounding a variety of cultural voices, producing interesting cultural confluences, as in the combination of Indian and South African artistry in Today Is My Day and In the combination of Indian and European art in Excuse Me, Is This India?

Laced with ancestral invocations and the confluences of polity, these are forthright poems that pound with heart rhythms, ooze with street love and call for a brazen fist.

While her texts remain strictly concerned with surface description, Tan seeks rare moments of spatiotemporal collapse--those confluences of jet lag, solitude, and the comfort of an environment at once totally foreign and strangely embracing--that constitute a kind of waking dream state and that she terms "petit morts," in a deliberate evocation of the French expression for sexual climax.