In this poetry collection, Margaret Randall uses the metaphor of ruins to meditate on time's movement--through memory, through cities, through the leavings of history, and through the bodies of people who have experienced time's transformations and traumas. Randall's ruins include not only Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Kiet Siel, Petra, and sites in ancient Greece and Egypt, but also Auschwitz-Birkenau and lives shattered by torture and oppression.

""Always there is that moment of arrival, as another reality rises before me, superimposed upon the one I live...