This new collection of poems by Jane King, organized around the metaphors of spectacle, performance, and vulnerability, offers a map to being "lost in this strange century." This is sought in the dialectics of birth and death and in remembering the vision of the child in the midst of adult despairs. Her observant eye taking in the beauties and droughts, climatic and human, that she sees in St. Lucia and in the semipublic lives of her neighbors. Performance Anxiety takes further those signs in the earlier collections that Jane King is a distinctively original explorer of the inner person and of the world on the margins of perception.