These poems, acting as spare parts in themselves, go into the making of one smooth-running, powerful engine. --Diane Glancy, author of Pushing the Bear In these poignant poems, Hada probes the natural and human worlds with equal candor, forcefulness, and literary artistry. His canvas is broad, and he paints it with rare compassion, grit, and unblinking emotional honesty. This is a book to read and return to, again and again, for the little triumphs necessary to sustain us through the tragedies of our lives. --Larry D. Thomas 2008 Texas Poet Laureate & Member, Texas Institute of Letters

With none of the cloying sentimentality of some so-called "nature poets," Hada writes of the natural world as we actually experience it. Few poets since Robert Frost have spoken as clearly and movingly about our attraction to and alienation from the natural world that surrounds us even when we can't be said to be fully in it. In these poems, the speaker is both the man standing on his stoop "looking up at stars" as "tree frogs chortle" and the man who hears the birds more distantly now as he walks tiredly back down the road he has helped to clear and to pave. In the haunting, "Two Deer at...