Table of Contents
Friction 1
I.
Still Life with Metalworking Shop 5
Ars Persona 6
n: Shield, or Shell Covering 7
Some Unsettling Connections 8
In which I climb a tree, as a child, and find my father's initials about 16 feet off the ground 9
How to Get Into a Poem 10
On Labor 11
Ode to the Letter Q 13
Love's Varietal 14
In a different sky, on a different night 15
Apostrophe 16
II.
Did you hear about that video camera that fell out of a plane and landed in a pig trough 19
A map, two points, the line between them 21
The Bath 24
The Arborist 26
Other Deluges 28
How to Read Whitewater in the Mid-Atlantic Region 30
Acquired Taste 31
The More Interesting Story 32
The Hunting Camp 33
III.
As in Nowhere, No-One 37
The Minnow 38
In which the photograph has very little to do with the memory associated with it 40
In the Morning, in the Evening 42
Burial at Sea 44
The Result of an Overabundance of Scenery 46
H.O. Andrews & Sons 47
Notes on the Spine, Pt. 1 48
Notes on the Spine, Pt. 2 50
IV.
A Brief History of Fruit 53
The Collapse 54
The Anglo-Saxons Move to Warmer Climes 58
The Dawn, Suffused with Roosters 59
Your Princess Is in Another Castle 60
Some Mirages of the Heat-Addled 61
No one needs another poem about the Second World War 62
Jesus in a Prom Gown 64
In which voluntourism 66
President Trump, thank you for calling, and good evening, it is night over here 68
Pastoral 70
V.
Next of Kin 73
The Garden 74
In the Evening, in the Morning 76
Your Inbox. Love, Manila 78
Elegy for One Who Died in the Decade It Took to Write This Poem About Dying 80
1 Contemplating a Career in Ornithology, age 12 82
Fugue in A and D 84
On Cold, On Green 85
Pagmamano 87
In which I learn that I will not be moving back to Pennsylvania 89
In which there are several half-Asian folks at a faculty meeting 90
The Discrete Mathematics of a Mixed-Race Anxiety Sufferer 91
What We Have 93
Mango Mouth 94
Acknowledgments 97
Notes 98
