These poems peel back the layers of suburban life and the American Dream. Vivian Maier was a self-taught street photographer who was born to an immigrant family in New York, and later worked as a nanny for well-to-do families in Chicago. Vivian was a  documentarian of her place and time. She can be compassionate, abrasive, and meditative. Her subjects tell their own stories. More than anything, the poems are a response to her work, which is all we have that comes directly from her. It is a deliberate challenge to the “mystery nanny” she is reduced to in much of the constructed narrative of her life.