This twenty-first winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry unravels the landscapes of childhood migrations and passages across oceans and continents, seasons and languages, mapping the geographies of longing, loss, grief, and conflict--Provided by publisher.

"Coming of age as a Jewish woman in America"
In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young woman s relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love, and female sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies, a force somehow responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines survival, assimilation, and intermarriage, subjects bound together by complex, if...

What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in "Service" is truthcomplex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossibleabout the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition that comes with returning home to find the war reduced to background noise for a remote civilian population. Bruce Lack s forceful, authentic poetry confronts the human cost of sending young men and women to fight a war of questionable justification against an insurgency unbound by rules of engagement. Lack s poems engage honestly with the frustration of fighting an elusive, ruthless enemy, the...