"Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section--a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer's--rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, 'the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane'"-- Provided by publisher.

"First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1408)"--Title page verso.

Son --Beckoned -- Epitaph -- Deadout -- Carbonized forest -- Entenderment -- Madonna del Parto -- On a sentence by Fernanda Melchor -- Stepping out of the light -- What it sounds like -- Where once a solid house -- The sounding -- First ballad: a wreath -- Archaic mano -- Tell them no -- Evaporación: a border history -- Ruth -- Littoral zone.