"Leaving the theater I stand outside in a dark of black lipstick the world wears when everyone leaves." Language like this - savory, sensuous and ripe with the unexpected - is among Carol Ellis' strengths, along with an intelligence that converts the ordinary into the wild and the strange. They pour from her, these poems, not in the form of stories exactly, narrative, but in a profusion of responses to the world, the seen, the experienced and the imagined. "Thunder. The dogs bark. The gods are angry say those who believe in gods. The gods are always angry or out in the back alley by the dumpster smoking a cigarette."Reader, think of Carol Ellis' poems this way: it's like stepping into the realm of dreams, but dreams wittier and more sumptuous than those that favor most of us each night.