Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in
the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish
mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long
multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural
history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third
section--a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his
mother dying of Alzheimer's--rise from the page like hymns, transforming
slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our
most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a
characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, "the most
eclectic diction since Hart Crane."