"Is anything common?" Katherine Gekker asks in her debut collection, In Search of Warm Breathing Things. The answer, in these richly detailed poems, is no. Gekker is a keen observer, able to "unlock the beauty hidden" in the ordinary. An iridescent grackle becomes a symbol of hope, "collarbones shimmer like wings." Weaving images of the natural world with glimpses of a struggling marriage, Gekker portrays life in all its emotional complexity. "Two bees are fighting or courting-- I can't tell which," she writes in "To Cast a Shadow Again." Yet there are moments of joy, the promise of transformation. "My shift billows, diaphanous.... I can seduce anyone tonight beneath fronds slicing like blades."

-- Ellen Bass