I have to live exists in the conceptual overlap between the "I" that is not confessional but turned out to the world and the desire for a "living privacy" that refuses the violence of the look. This is a poetry that enacts emotional intelligence; it employs the body and the sensory as modes of inquiry — because they are. In this way, in an unequivocal, decolonizing gesture, the "I" of these poems re-sees what it's been trained to un-see. The speaker of these poems is her own scientist, her own forensic authority, because the information she's been handed cannot be trusted. The result is pained, just and ecstatic. (From McClelland & Stewart)