The poems in this collection are meditations on the natural world, written from the perspective of what Li-Young Lee has aptly termed "a passionate interiority." The history and geography of the American West inspire many of the poems' investigations of the environment and the role of the individual in relation to that environment. In Cecily Parks's landscape made strange by human consciousness, being lost is a requirement, though not a guarantee, of being found.

CECILY PARKS's chapbook, Cold Work, won the 2005 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Best New Poets 2007 and Tin House, and she has an essay in A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise: Twenty Young Writers on Finding a Place in the Natural World.