The poems in this first collection move through the arc of a life, with a tender focus on the landscape of childhood and the natural world. A young child's delight in language--'derelict and delectation...onyx and obsidian'-- matures to contemplate what language, myth, and art can teach us about inevitable loss: of a home the child, her mother, and sisters were forced by a troubled father to flee; of aunts, uncles, and that mother who had once seemed eternal. Woven into this narrative, the title character--a nomadic woman who lives without money--appears with her porcelain begging bowl, a figure from myth, a touchstone for what is everlasting, a moment of transcendence into a more benevolent world, the one glimpsed again and again in these poems.