"I never thought I'd actually release any of this stuff," she says. "It all seemed too personal, like taking off my clothes in public- just things I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to see, things I felt too naked to talk about."

"Sleeping With Tigers", released through CafePress, is actually two books in one. The first part is titled "Ghost", poems from a first book that Lilith says sprang from a crippling depression after the death of a close friend.

"It was either write or be buried. The only thing I could do was take all that raw pain and try to turn it into something that wouldn't kill me, something actually productive.

"One day the dam just burst. I started writing like crazy; not sleeping and barely eating. 'Ghost' came out in two or three weeks, it just roared out. I don't know how anybody lived with me during that time." She laughs. "I was incredibly bitchy. It's a wonder my friends suggested I put the poems in a book, I'm sure they were sick of them. And me."

The second half of the book, titled "Sleeping With Tigers", is all-new poems, ranging in subject matter and tone from a cold, matter-of-fact poem about domestic violence (Punch) to a light, whimsical imagined conversation between Achilles and Sappho (Conversation). These poems, written in a slightly-less feverish six months, seem less struck with guilt and grief and more extroverted in tone. Still, they contain all the personal immediacy and flashes of brutal humor- and vulnerability- that Saintcrow's readers have come to expect.

With three more urban fantasy novels forthcoming from ImaJinn Books, Lilith says she doesn't have much time for the kind of self-examination and quiet reflection poetry needs. But all the same, she'll keep her pen handy.

"If a poem comes knocking at the door, who am I to get in the way? The words sort of write me, not the other way around. I'm just a scribe. I work better in chaos anyway, that's why I have kids."