The chimera, that mythic female monster, an amalgam of lion, serpent, and goat, that has come to signify the impossible illusion, haunts Rosalind Brenner's debut collection, but she does not wince at the notion of looking hard at the seeming negatives and positives of life’s journey, working as she does to transform the poisons of this encountered world into the energy of enlightened awareness. And journey we do across time and locale, from mid-century Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, where ‘chickens squawk in Grandma’s backyard,’ to the contemporary. Every Glittering Chimera tells the story of being a woman in America through the lens of the personal.