"Valerie Bandura's clean, crafted, headlong-into-the-breach poems are scary in their intensity. They are full of the violence of history, and Europe, and family, and motherhood, and bodies, and fate. Reader, there is a little of hell in them, and a ferocious desire for truth, which is to say, their speaker is engaged in the brave, sometimes appalling struggle to turn into a human being. FREAK SHOW is a terrific book."

—Tony Hoagland