“a woman must be perfect sin cicatrice no cicatrice no cicada on the
Record tsk tsk tsk no blur I link arms with you Marsha mi madre
Marsha P Johnson my mother rises in roses the pier at Christopher
street wakens with your perfect singing your perfect body you turn
dock water to roses.”
- From Mixpantli-Malinche, a poem is a house

The poems start as a house but transform through the manuscript. Not merely a Bruja, ravenswood is an archiving alchemist of the poem’s effects upon consciousness, as she causes the houses of the poems to first float on water, then follow with gold, war, genocide, a diaspora and eventually dreams of a city again. Stanzas as pages clump together on singular pages, a hint of further intersecting and separating as a dance.
There is much about Ravenswood that reminds us of Rimbaud and their disregard for formality while saving all regard for the objects of their words, and with all the imperiousness that accompanies that self-awareness (see Keats, Dickinson, Tzara, Breton et. al) and the willingness to inhabit other entities for the sake of catching the right line:

“it’s the dream of the grass blowing & someone says
there are Damson pears we dance in pairs a thin woman
with the world air-raid around because she’s thin y able a horse
in clothes rides along her wind-on-the-arm-of-the-world
she says here are pears take them if you want
but we’re off to Portland where grass can blow along the Willamette
going out to meet the day no time to waste for water or women”
- the dream of the grass blowing

Receipt is arguably the centerpiece of the manuscript’s fluidity, i.e. constantly shifting perspectives in the collection- halfway through, Receipt promises you can find your way through this terrain if you use it as a compass.
And really, what could be more American than a receipt as the second half of the collection opens with “Ode to America” followed by sketches from the diaspora of the postmodern Southwest, a place of war as much as any other. In the US Desert, the government makes no discrepancy between empty containers and empty bodies. It is this landscape that Ravenswood bleeds into an Intersectional and generationally split Los Angeles, the great length of Aztlan and distant holy lands haunt this place of development and gentrification, which gradually seeps into the intersectional interior of identity and body.

“there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree she said

you have to forgive men
I immediately wanted to say for how long.
I knew she’d say it’s a process and a cycle
that we have to thank them for wheels and the trips to CVS and the
houses
that it’s a balancing act for everything everywhere”
- From Elementary School

ravenswood’s poem on divers memorias displays some of the most innovative arrangement of stanzas, who in format are blocked off from each other like city neighborhoods segregated by highways, retaining walls and holding washes. Of all the things the poet’s fluid poems have morphed into throughout the manuscript, its form by the end of the diaspora section is a community that has been divided against itself by form and formality.
Our final shift as we land within the poet’s collection is toward the necessarily apocalyptic, the knowledge that it is always with us and not necessarily the end, as the entities of these lands are infinitely resourceful, able to adapt and find a way to relate to each other. It turns out Lot’s Wife is alive and well in this world as in all world’s or at least her enduring poem to the rest of us:

“of the city behind me
spinning our temples on fire.
our golden bowls.      were they
laughing or screaming or crying or singing.
anyone who saw me
might’ve thought I was dancing

might’ve thought I was raging,
flicking a flea from my forearm;

an animal, a hare, a roadsnake
(anything met in nature is frightening.

& winds
anything that creeps deeper than you is frightening.)

if anyone’d seen me theyd’ve thought I was dancing
or turning for a story, a kiss, maybe.”

- from anyone who saw me might’ve thought I was dancing

In so many ways, ravenswood is the ultimate “Westerner,” a product of so many intersecting cultures that have come to call California and its associated contado as home, that her historical riff on the ancient Aztlan to the very anxiety ridden postmodern now can only be through so many eyes, so many of the multitudes that she contains in a far more honest manner than the poet who originally coined that phrase, that we can, in good faith, believe we are in the best hands when we are looking toward a literary future in the West.

As remarkable as the multilingual landscape of linda ravenswood’s a poem is a house, perhaps equally remarkable is the multi-voice technique and device she brings to bear on her collection. Does our “narrator” live at the scene of an accident or the scene of the crime? It depends on who is speaking which line in this book. To traverse the distance between these two voices is “to wander to the other side of grief.”

But one doesn’t wander long as there is no stasis in ravenwood’s form. The poet’s titles alone here are their own voice, nay even their own poems prefacing the voices that are to follow. A thing is both an accident and the scene of a crime.