In her first full-length poetry collection, Catherine French reveals a curiosity about the complexities of the quotidian and a keen sensitivity to the strangeness and magic that lie within all our human experiences, from learning the shapes of the alphabet, realizing how they failed in that attempt to join / the physical and abstract, how each sound / fell short of the world, to watching the death of a horse, its beauty sent back / through the long funnel / to abstraction.

These are poems of rich imagery and profound psychological insight, of wry ironies and compelling truths. French is a...