The back of the slim book says "Fiction/Gay & Lesbian Studies" but really it's a print recording of Thea Hillman's voice. Sometimes set as poetry, sometimes set as prose, the text is always gorgeously, unrelentingly first person. Hillman is singing, crying, raging, seducing, preaching—playing on the complete range of human verbal expression. Small surprise that she's veteran of the Spoken Word scene and a tag-team Haiku Slam champion.

I want Depending on the Light to come out as a Book on Tape. I want to hear her voice beating out all the words. I feel like a dumb-ass for never having seen her perform live.

She came like haiku
Five (breath) seven five (breath breath)
Trembling air then gone

I'm on BART one morning, commuting to work, when I suddenly realize I've gotten all hot and bothered from reading one of Hillman's prose pieces, Having Holly. Flushed and embarrassed, I look over at my pre-coffee-tired fellow passengers and wonder if they've noticed that I'm reading lesbian erotica (and think that Thea would be laughing if she knew).

Going back to the words, I try to figure out where all the sexiness is coming from, and see that it's Hillman's gentle grasp of conflicting, complex emotions. In two and a half short pages, the writing vaults across adolescent uncertainty, violent lust, the small calculations of new relationships ("Phrases fill my head like you know I'm not expecting anything") and finally lands at the intersection of sex and language: "Writing Holly is having Holly."

Hillman's writing is sexy because it's smart and refuses to simplify things. She bundles complexity together, rocks it into harmony and hands it to you in one explosive piece after another.

You're not sure if I'm
Butch or femme   I don't wonder
I think that's boring

Her range impresses. There are free-verse poems; Haiku; prose-poetry letters to friends, lovers and strangers; bursts of autobiographical sudden fiction; erotic episodes; travel tales; bus vignettes; laments and meditations. She channels love, lust, rage, grief and tenderness.

Hillman's varied style and subject matter provoke different reactions. While most of her writing held me captive, some disappointed me. The pieces that slip from art to manifesto, pontificating on the Horrors of Plastic Surgery, Boys and Men who are Bad, and abuses of all kinds, act as predictable sermons and lose some of their human authenticity.

Also, there were moments when the cruelty of her words shocked me with straightforward violence and swaggering bravado: "I want to dress like Santa and have parents take pictures of their kids sitting on my cock." That line (and others) comes like a slap to the face. But that's probably her point. I doubt making the audience comfortable is part of Hillman's agenda:

"No one ever thought to tell me it's okay to feel uncomfortable," she writes. Hillman's gift to us is how powerfully she shows that contradiction is life, contradiction is us, contradiction is okay. In fact, the keystone piece to Depending on the Light may be "Contradiction." Hillman jumps rope with prescribed social boundaries: sexuality, gender, power, anything and everything. Here, and throughout her collection, she writes about loving girls who look like boys. About being Jewish and celebrating (and O.D.ing on) Christmas. About being a homebody and a traveling poet, living outside accepted social rhythms. Her writing is often about keeping feet in two worlds, belonging in neither but passing in both. Passing along the borders of other people's territories, be they sexual, religious or social.

Reading Depending on the Light, I get the sense that Hillman's life is the epic poem, and her poetry and prose are the simple documentation of it. Her writing makes me want to leave this book in airports, at bus stations, on park benches. I want to put it in the paths of people who might need to know that feeling like a freak is fine, better than fine.

For more information about Depending on the Light, Thea Hillman, her work and performances, please visit http://www.theahillman.com/.

Wesley Hall is a producer, writer and editor living in San Francisco. E-mail her at wesley@lollyrocket.com.