While Rathburn's language is graceful, and most of these poems were published in journals before being collected here, I have to say that this was something of a disappointment. The first section in the book is by far the strongest, but that makes the rest of the book that much more of a let-down. The middle section, especially, is built more of short scenes that read more like poetic prose than polished poems, and many of them come across as attempting to be more clever than they are, and simply falling short. All together, I'm afraid the collection is somewhat boring with few stand-out moments. I don't expect to want to come back to and re-read every poem in a collection, or even most, but I do generally expect to find a few poems that will draw me back over and over again, for the language if not the content. Here, there wasn't a single one that I felt the need to mark (as I normally would) as one to come back to at a later date.

Simply, I'm afraid I was incredibly disappointed with this one, and wouldn't recommend it. It's not that the poems are bad...but they're also not particularly memorable or striking. They're just well written and thematically smart, which simply isn't enough--at least not for this reader. ( )