only one or two titles a year, is weU known. Less known is the significant number of gifted, mature poets whose work, thanks partly to that avalanche, has continued for years to slide past the blearing eyes ofinundated book publishers. My congratulations to Utah State University Press and to Herbert Leibowitz, judge for its 1996 May Swenson Poetry Award, for rescuing this superb collection and its author from prolonged oversight. Freisinger's milieu is irony—in the best and deepest sense. It is with-k in the tension between the real and ideal that Freisinger locates our Uves. An empty-nest couple, having just made love with a desire become spontaneous and intense from "the pure voltage" of its "long absence," settles back, "spliced together, lightly touching,/listening; to the wind's violence, to sleet/on paned glass, to blood picking its way/through thickened arteries, cautionlit/crews combing streets for limb-downed/ lines, repairing what they can." Freisinger's subjects are wonderfully diverse, from love to death, from intimacy to isolation, from metaphysics to shop class, from vacuum cleaner salesman to Walt Whitman. His poems are funny, sad, light, dark, hopeful, grim, and quite often aU of these at once. One must also admire the music of his lines. Listen to this meditation on the nose, from "Thoughts on a Child's Nose Swallowed by a Dog": Tn a world growing duU with sameness/imagine its infinite permutations/of skin, cartilage, and bone: the juts snubs and swales, fine grades/of Roman, Greek, Retroussé, the sure/cursive of septal-vestibular flared papulae dehcate as the breast/ nipples' filigree, the three turbinate/shelves sifting dusty debris,warming/breath for its pink plunge lungward." Don't overlook this book. (WT) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, 339 pp., $24 This book started as a magazine assignment for Fadiman, the new editor of The American Scholar, but evolved into an almost decade-long exploration of a Hmong family's troubled interactions with the Western medical community when their infant daughter, Lia, became ill. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao Lee, immigrated to Merced, California, from Laos in 1980 with eleven children. They joined a large community of Hmong living in Merced and had their first American medical experience when Lia was born in 1982. Three months later the Lees found themselves back at the Merced County Hospital when Lia started having a seizure that would not stop. She was diagnosed by American doctors as having severe epilepsy and by her family as having a condition caUed quag dab peg, which translates as "the spirit catches you and you faU down." This discrepancy in diagnoses began a long struggle between the Lees and American doctors that encompassed language difficulties (the Lees spoke no English The Missouri Review »181 and often no translator was available ), Hmong restrictions on many medical procedures, and misunderstandings over dosages and combinations of medication. EventuaUy Lia was placed in a foster home for several months. The general differences of approach between these two communities (spinal taps and drug cocktails warred with ritual washings and pig sacrifices) culminated in Lia's final massive series of seizures, which left her brain dead in 1986. Fadiman meticulously chronicles this tragic story, interviewing the Lees, social workers, Hmong leaders in the community, and virtuaUy every doctor who ever treated Lia. Her obvious affection for the Lees and her sympathy for their plight is balanced by the care she takes to be fair in detailing both cultures ' treatments for illness. She also interweaves the Lees' tale with the history of the Hmong people, focusing on the Hmongs' life in Laos and their work for the American CIA during the Vietnam War, which led to destruction of their villages and necessitated flight to Thailand and eventually to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Foua and Nao Kao Lee and their chUdren were part of this wave of refugees, and Fadiman's positioning of the Lee family in the context of the general Hmong experience helps to explain their resistance to American...