Genny Lin has a unique way of describing life in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. “Winter Place” has a kind of gritty-flashy feel to it, but I especially like the imagery at the end of her poem:

It ain’t so bad
the Coolies reasoned
as they jumped ship only to
sweat in baskets
with pickaxes and dynamite
twenty thousand feet in the Sierras
like wet human laundry