Carla Harryman's latest challenge to the separation of literary genres features the sensual world and critical perspectives of a maverick baby, who enters the book as "fire in the womb with a skirt." Yet the baby of Baby is also a word whose function is and must be as pliable as a new gender. One wouldn't want to pin baby down, for, as a representative and cognoscenti of interpenetrated past, presents, and futures, Baby keeps open the capacity for revision.