to terms with bereavement, the loss of love, and betrayal, Katie Donovan travels from personal stories to imagined realms, from the fate of an Indian outcast to a lover's treachery, from the lamprey grip of a heroin addict to the shooting of one cousin by another in the 1798 Irish rebellion, to watching a healer in Brazil perform surgery without anesthetic. Gradually talismans of death are turned inside out as the poet's path ascends to the living world, and a sequence of journeys. These poems dance with the skeleton at the crossroads between the end and the beginning, the visceral physical world, and the phantom parade of the past.

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