Cook's tendency to employ recurring motifs might at first blush smack of gimmickry, were it not for her subtler gifts: a consistently pitch-perfect tone and uncanny knack for scene-setting to evoke lingering (and always unsettling) moods that draw the reader deep into the space of her poems, gradually inviting the realization that there's something going on beneath the haunting surface of the work that's only too immediate and real. And if a reader were caught looking too complacent, something (perhaps the creeping chill of discomfiting candor) may just crawl out of the bowels of that mysterious space and grab her by the leg.