Articulation is a synonym for eloquence, and in these poems especially this is true: faithful renderings, vatic cries, devotional meditations: a landscape, a seascape, and an inscape intricately involved in each others’ symmetries. A monumental debut. —D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys

“Even doubt is a flame,” writes Amanda Hawkins in this beautiful new collection of poems. At the heart of this book is personal loss, hemmed by the science of bodies transformed into ash. —Amber Flora Thomas, author of Eye of Water

Amanda Hawkins’s poems connect Israeli settler colonialism of Palestine with the ongoing desecration of America’s Native lands such as Bears Ears National Monument, all the while remaining tender and open to transformation as they admit “Something about driving the eastern Sierras makes me understand.” And this understanding will blossom in your mind, dear reader, long after you put the book down. —Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria

Deftly drawing a line from religious faith to the mortal body to our increasingly fragile environment, Hawkins reckons with our most primal vulnerabilities and, consequently, reckons with the febrile divisions that ought to connect us. From poem to poem, they exude tenderness and the passionate hope that our belief systems need not be bound by institutions or orthodoxies but by witness, love, and a shared sense of possibility, or as Hawkins beautifully observes “this hope is entrance.” —Jennifer Chang, author of An Authentic Life