Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable

These poems are living roads to so many places, here and there, past and present. The roads are dangerous; the words speak to and for the many of us who live as strangers in the strange lands of the flesh and of the spirit. There are tributes to named firefighters who died in the front lines and to Colin Kaepernick, to the unnamed young woman who cuts herself and the unnamed young man on his road to nowhere. Tiel Aisha Ansari uses various verse forms to comprehend and contain the passion and pain of the poems. Structured but never forced - they flow like the blues, jazz piano, sand dunes, windmill blades. The collection is beautifully put together - the poems make sense adjacent to each other, and at the same time each one carries us into a different world. A wonderful book - wonderful words from a very very talented poet. Mary Cresswell, author of Field Notes and Fish