Raised on a family farm in the Pacific Northwest, Allen Braden has deep connections to rural life. Even at its most lyrical, his language evokes the local dialect of the West, his West. These poems, balancing elegy and affirmation, measure human and animal relationships with "brute geometry" in order to calculate the damage we require of ourselves.

Returning to variations of a sonnet titled "Taboo against the Word Beauty," Braden relentlessly pursues the possibility of naming the beautiful without ignoring what has so often and so widely been destroyed by human hands.