At the centre of Kara Candito's second poetry collection is the struggle of a US citizen and a Mexican citizen to find a common space and language in their relationship while navigating the immigration system, a process that sometimes requires magical thinking just to endure. By employing a kind of documentary poetics that views the application process through different angles and perspectives, Candito crafts discourses around xenophobia, otherness, and national and ethnic identity.

Kara Candito is a creative writing professor at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, and a cocurator of the Monsters of Poetry reading series in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the recipient of scholarships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Santa Fe Arts Institute. Her work has been published in numerous journals and her first poetry collection, Taste of Cherry, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.