Alone in the Burning reveals a watchful, sensitive child trying to find a way to thrive in a difficult environment. In spare, lyrical language, McVicker gives us a collection of imagistic poems that evoke the child's claustrophobic world, blended with prose poems that create complication, momentum, and tension, drawing the reader into the search to connect to intuition, the need to find a way through the burning, to breathe. Language and the natural world provide her with clues, pointing to freedom and authentic selfhood. Reading Alone in the Burning is like listening to a piano fugue, notes dropping one by one into silence, each enlarging our awareness with subtle echoes that continue to resonate after we've turned the last page.