You sit down one morning at a sway-backed diner in a West Desert town. Wisps of story drift from the far end of the lunch counter or a back booth, a story you almost pull together: this aunt, that brother. You make out relationships, intertwining lives. You start to care, to wonder. And you realize, My life is there, too, parts of it. The morning light shifts across worn tile, the door of the diner rings open and closed. The greetings between customers. The unseen short-order cook rattling around behind his window. A waitress refills your cup, and you wait for the next wisp of story. [from publisher's web site]
Winner of the 2008 Poetry Award, Association for Mormon Letters
Table of Contents:
Northern Cross
Salt Valley
Carpooling
Cutting the Last Hay
Stone, Water, Brothers
Water Canyon hunting us.
Conjunction
The Voice of Water Here
Where Thou Lodgest
Standing on the Edge of the Valley
Mapping the Bones of the World
Pruning the Blood Plum Tree
Knotted Ponderosa
In Passing to Her Fathers
The Fine and Dying Art of Shaping Light into Words
Going Down to Ocean
Silicon
Timpie Valley
Athena
October above Trial Lake
Keeping Fire
Tracking Sun
Floating Islands
Token
Under the Hunter
dos dueños
Taxonomy of Spirits