Here is a collection whose reach is insatiable. With a gymnastic flow that both utilizes and interrogates language, Conroy navigates loss and grief, love and memory, longing and frustration. The syntax is dizzying, the digressions erudite, and yet it all points to self-interrogation. In these poems, the dead are not dead, time suspends at the corner of the page, and nature intrudes relentlessly in a busy parlor of images. Whether it is champagne flowering from its bottle or "a bouquet of birds emerging from a snake's unhinged jaw," the motion of these poems is sudden, eruptive, and impossible to forget.