Keenly mindful of their ancestors and the immigrations that have brought them here, the speakers of these poems, their various personae, explore the knots of familial experience, what it's like to be both parent and child simultaneously, to be embraced by family as well as to lose it, to celebrate kinship and endure its sorrows and changes.

John Hennessy is the author of two previous collections, Coney Island Pilgrims and Bridge and Tunnel, and his poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2024, The New Republic, Poetry, The Yale Review, and more. With Ostap Kin he is the translator of Serhiy Zhadan's award-winning A New Orthography, the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond , and Yuri Andrukhovych's Set Change. Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.