Poetry. THIS VERSION OF EARTH begins with the voice of the hippest, wisest teenager you can imagine, stuck in New Jersey but heading for Manhattan every chance she gets. Gradually, her world enlarges and we learn about the experiences that shape her: her Iranian-American family and other people's blinkered, bigoted reactions to it; her parents' separation; encounters with careless, threatening men. These 'big themes' rest quietly within Soraya Shalforoosh's uniquely charming poems, where office friendships, births, marriages, and deaths take place in the still-thrilling city and in this poet's always clear, always loving, constantly surprised and surprising imagination. Bracing as any New York novel, these poems sing the right-here, right- now.--Kathleen Ossip