At eighteen, Evelyn Lau published a journal of her life on "the streets" and her experiences with drugs and prostitution. Runaway was a chronicle of harsh survival, pain, and an obsession with writing which helped provide an escape from the deadness of the street. For her, poetry was the voice of the hope and the disillusionment that she felt as she passed from the innocence of a young girl down through the confusing hell of the street and into the often harsher realities of the "straight" world. Strong, intimate, disturbing and finally poignant, Evelyn Lau's poems are really about people, trapped and hurting behind their many masks of conformity. "Evelyn Lau is the poet I've been waiting for . . . . She has the experience and street-learned savvy to see the cruel hoax that idiots and hypocrites call civilization. Her lines and images are compellingly fresh. Her observations are free of literary jargon. If early success doesn't weaken her rage, doesn't soften her indictments, her future success is inevitable."- Irving Layton