"By turns sumptuous and stark, the thirty-seven poems of Monica Ferrell's debut collection take us on a breathless chase. Here the hunting grounds are lushly imagined landscapes drawn from both fantasy and the sphere of the familiar-a drowned Atlantis, the hospital room where a baby is born, a kitchen where two lovers vie-sand our quarry the perilous raptures of creaturely existence. What lies at the heart of this work is a fearless and generous spirit, undaunted in its quest to fully meet experience. Whether she speaks through the mask of an emperor's orphaned son or in the sly cadences of modern street-talk, the urgency propelling Ferrell's poems can alwaysbe discerned, pulsing in the beat of her fierce music, peering out from her riotous imagery. The effect of such language is enchantment - that Nabokov claimed as the primary function of literature."--BOOK JACKET.