What happens to lost daughters trying to find their way home with the only road map being the bowing palm trees pointing the path? Where does love exist if not for raw lips and feet bloodied from the chase? Falling for men whose kisses promise life but whose legs disappear when the time comes to rest in the arms of permanence. What happens to the girl who loses herself? In OPHELIA RISING we follow her through abandon, witness her rising, and experience her transcendence. A feat not for the squeamish. Poems bring us up close and inside the internal world of a girl discovering the self she lost along the way. "I would want to be who I was in the beginning/But the world hid her from me," O.R. writes. The heroine in these exquisitely written poems runs through the arms of strangers looking for the nurture she never got. There is a sense throughout that there was never a mother for her to run to; that her mother was also a lost daughter, running. In a later poem, O.R. tells whoever sees her mother to tell her, "She has suffered her fate, but has triumphed in her wake." And she has. In becoming a woman, she has become a mother and in motherhood comes into being. Nicca Ray, from her Foreword.