K. A. Hays' debut collection opens with an invitation to the apocalypse, an act of American bravado that soon gives way to fear of disaster, dread of violence, and grief for the dead. As the book's "lilies and fowls"--seedlings and swifts, thrushes and pitch pines--feed and grow, they become figures for human struggle. The speaker of these poems longs for God, for a mind that outlasts the body, and for a way to live with acceptance in a world that is chaotic and uncertain. Dear Apocalypse, the reader finds in the closing sections, does not dare the world to end so much as it asks it to stay,...

Windthrow: a forestry term for the uprooting or breaking of trees by wind. The voices of K. A. Hays' third volume of poetry speak out of nature's violent transformations. At turns self-effacing and empathic, fearful and accepting, these are poems of heat: the heat of new motherhood, of uncertainty, and of grief. Here, the things of a teeming world--- the truck stacked with cut trees, - -the military jet, droning over, - and -the beachgrass, blown / with dusty miller sprout---are bound for renewal and ruin. In poems spare and strange, Hays looks outward to lay bare the complexities of our...