The book begins with the murder in New York of her rapper-boyfriend whose career Clio had helped launch. Along with the mourning, guilt and soul searching, Clio questions the whole enterprise of identity.
Suffering has turned her ecstatic, dancing nature in a different direction. Through the text of Song of Songs and the reconstruction of Jewish medieval Girona, Clio accesses voices of the past and locates identity in the process of reaching through time and pulling oneself into the future.
In a nod to her polyvocal nature, various characters narrate the sometime comic, sometime painful story of her learning curve in historical Europe. Clio, once a club dancer, finds balance in the nimble movement of the mind.
She comes to accept her own creative consciousness, herself as a poet. This is Clio. The characters that she meets β an Israeli developer, a Catalan theater producer, a Spanish journalist β are works of the imagination and people that respond to her unique character, both willfully naive and often wise.
But the core of the journey, both inner and outer, is based on experiences of my own. In that culturally vital fifteen years, I wrote about politically conscious rappers, breakdancers, world musicians and international celebrities.
