At eighteen, Evelyn Lau published a journal of her life on "the streets" and her experiences with drugs and prostitution. 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 Laus poems are really about people, trapped and hurting behind their many masks of conformity.