A subtle centrifugal force drives this collection. By turns witty, solemn or capricious, the book moves outward from private, often lyrical poems about childhood and memory on into the realm of the "real world's" self-serving myths, fears, and institutionalized inequities, and from there into work that celebrates the joys of love and the beauty and mystery of the natural world, and then still further outward into poems that consider the very nature of reality, what it means to be human, and where to find glimpses of the sacred in the midst of the profane and the disenchanted.