Robin Coste Lewis' fierce and arresting poetry has its roots in Compton

LOS ANGELES - The white fence is new, but the tree she planted as a child still stands in front of the wood house, now stucco, pale yellow and cracked, forgotten Christmas lights hanging from its eaves. She laughs.

Time sucks her back, the way it does, and she talks about backyard camping, cockfights and how men dressed up in suits after dinner and strolled through Compton until way after dark, imagining what they might have become if they were another color. Not black.

It's in her poetry, the way one's own skin can be a terrible, beautiful thing. Robin Coste Lewis steps to the sidewalk on South Central Avenue, a half-century swirling around her. She learned to ride a bike here; the family two doors down kept chickens. It seemed then like country and city were mixed into a little girl's idyll, before Compton became "Straight Outta Compton" and before her first boyfriend, a geeky 16-year-old, was shot and killed in a drive-by.

"This," she said, "is the X mark on my planet."

Lewis is a poet who won't let you look away. Her verse reaches