Hillary Gravendyk Prize-winning poet Alexandra Martinez mulls over the poet's existence in the United States. It is less a book about cultural identity than about class, power, and maintaining hope in the struggle against oppressive norms and structures. Concise indictments of an unjust society are deftly disguised as poems about nature, work, and family. In Our Lady of Perpetual Desert the desert and California aren't only background landscapes but characters.