Cockfights, a prophetic turnip, the "pharmack mysteries" of antidepressants . . . in this book the natural world looms as a potent and nearly conscious metaphor for desire, transcendence and loss. The power in these poems comes from a persistently idiosyncratic combination of subject, language and tone: the dark emotion energy of the subjects--illness, witch trials, lost children--the lush, urgent language, and the exacting, wry, relentlessly unsentimental tone.