Book excerpt: Poetry. "Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky's emergency brake but just remember it won't do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet's take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling the poems of EMERGENCY BRAKE become a young woman's survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril." David St. John"