"Lesle Lewis is alive with conflict. She wishes she were alive and not alive. Lucky for us readers, she is very alive. Scintillating with all her private and not so private mythologies, her poems beam down situations of utter contradiction both terrifying and calming. She sings the song of life in all its multitudinous guises. Finally, though, this is a book of joy, impossible to put down, impossible to deny."--James Tate This book is an intoxicating medicine garden where we learn to make connections through a myriad of small disjunctions, swallowing poems in doses like a set of morning pills. In lie down too, our journey is central, and the world--recast through the non sequitur of grief, through repetition and cycle--eventually allows all life to be born anew. From "Happy Flags in the Fall": We are one hundred percent here which is good before we have to leave. We are odd together. Two white chairs face each other. The bridge is out, the one that connects any thought to any other. We must drive a long ways around ourselves. This is the most charming afternoon of the decade. Here, the very small becomes our very center. Paradoxical and associative, the cracking of each poem's hardened chrysalis enlightens us. Lesle Lewis's books include Small Boat(winner of 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize) and Landscapes I & II(Alice James Books, 2006). Her poems have appeared in jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, Barrow Street, Sentence, Mississippi Review, American Letters & Commentary, Bateau, and many other journals. She lives in New Hampshire and teaches at Landmark College in Vermont.