In this lyrical and mature follow-up to Never Summer: Poems From Thin Air, Denver poet laureate Chris Ransick's new collection maps the intersections of the natural world's austere and grand beauty against the resiliency and power of the imagination, which in these poems swell and soar in opposition to the constraints and uncertainties of modern life.

The collection is organized into a series of suites that range from "An American Boyhood" to the "Motorcycle" to "Seasons," and like the facets of a Cubist painting, the poems in each suite reveal tiny fissures of experience and perception, evoking a better sense of its whole. Ransick's eye for detail, his talent for magnifying nuance, brings out the wonder and mystery of what we might consider, upon first glance, as merely ordinary.