Inspired by a mixed-media installation by artist Tomie Aria, Foo's second book continues her explorations of other artistic disciplines and their effect on the boundaries of writing. Her debut, Endou, featured poems and essays, portions of which were included in The Best American Essays 1995, and the Leah Stein Dance Company has choreographed a series of movement dance pieces, titled Imprint, based on Foo's work. A Malaysia native of Chinese extraction who arrived in the U.S. as an undocumented alien, Foo now works as a lawyer-advocate on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. She juxtaposes her own manipulations of chair-images with textual explorations of space, gesture, position and how individuals occupy their own history: "I am getting up.... I am
enfolds what happens where unknown place begins. The results of pressed, compact place (constantly changing) tell circumstances of me.// (Rebound or remain in such situations)." Like film developing in reverse, the narrator is slowly defined by the words and places that surround her, while she also shapes that exterior reality with her own body, ultimately creating a subtle yet undeniably compelling history of displacement, loss and love: "The place, made of parts, is aging./ When the door shuts, I believe I am heart/ and soul you came for, after." (Mar.)
