Mouth, Lisa Chen's debut collection of poetry, travels from parachute girls in Millbrae to Ezequiel the murderer at a border town, creating a cartography of geographic and bodily landscapes whose distances are measured by languages. As if wandering from place to place, Chen dabbles in different poetic forms, but always, words here confuse and betray, mouths eat and are eaten. Mouth is an elegiac love song to the mundane horrors of loss - genocide, heartbreak, revolution, exile. Yet, like Diane Arbus' photos, Chen's poems exude a mix of humor and pleasure, highlighting beauty in the perverse, and the perverse in the everyday. She gives voice to things that occur below the level of hearing or just beyond our notice-fragments of translated stories, unanswered bits of conversations, the mute assertiveness of a room.