Painkiller is the final book in a trilogy of collections that started with The Weather That Kills (1995), followed by Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha, 1996). Of these three collections, the poems in Painkiller are the most emotional and intimate, and yet they are also the most universal as they look at the consequences of love found and lost; passions unleashed; terror from human conduct and the awesome power of natural disaster. While this is a collection that responds in part to 9-11, many poems were written prior to that event, to the injury to the city and our psychic well-being. Those portents and that injury set the collection’s tone. Painkiller explores one poet’s vision of the city, her friends, her lover, her losses and connects those individual perceptions to a suffering world in turmoil. In the poem "In Like Paradise/Out Like the Blues", a poem from The Weather That Kills, Patricia Spears Jones wrote: "Each of turns to the hunger of stars/and wipes the crumbs from our mouths." Painkiller is about that feast.