Byssus—pronounced "bissus," and meaning the mussel's "beard," the tough fibers which anchor it to the seabed—is a book first and foremost about home, and what it takes to find and forge one: amongst friends, alert to mortality, to love, and to landscape. Her language, strongly rooted in the common names she finds in the sea, shore, and moor of her adopted Shetland, has already been widely admired for its startling originality. Here, through poems of astonishment and adoration, through charms and fables, and ultimately through a practice of attention and careful honoring—she shows how speech itself can be an act of home-making. This is a profound consideration of just what it means to get to know a place.