These are poems of highways & flowers, krakens & magnolias, skulls & meteorites. “I am what my body does not allow me to be,” the poet says, or said in Spanish, with a subsequent, parallel song proferred by the translator. These poems translate a country into a series of koans and aquatic musical possibilities, into a house made of pages. These poems are working through the damaged configuration of the world, its fragments and splinters, wondering if justice might still be possible at all. —John Pluecker