The poems in My Scarlet Ways are, most often, attempts at self-destruction by any means necessary—love, sex, language, God, and ultimately, fantasies of motherhood. With piercing passion and linguistic precision, Tanya Larkin, pursues and retreats from her reader like a poetic Mata Hari, drawing us closer, if only to entice and strike us again in poem after poem. As judge, Denise Duhamel writes, “Larkin is a poet of intelligence and intuition, of wily and wicked wisdom.” My Scarlet Ways is a new and unique addition to American poetry.