The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New
York's Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with
refuse and peopled by ghosts--of a dead lover, of a friend lost to
suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Marvin's haunting, passionate
poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a
world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape
of adolescence.