Grateful acknowledgment is made to the journals in which earlier—and in some cases quite different—versions of this work first appeared:
“CRACKLER” was originally published as “IN WHICH” in the Kenyon Review.
An earlier version of “CREEKTHROAT” was reprinted in The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling, edited by Robert Pinsky (W.W. Norton, 2019 ).
“SHED” was reprinted in the anthology In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide, edited by Ilya Kaminsky, Jesse Nathan, and Dominic Luxford (McSweeney’s, 2017 ), and featured on Poetry Daily.
“MOTH” was featured in the radio series Poetry Now.
“CHORUS: Petition” and “CLARY” are excerpted and adapted from the author’s 2010 book Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press).
The photograph on page five is Gourds for the Martins: Hale County, Alabama ( Summer 1936 ) by Walker Evans and was originally published in James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ( Houghton Mifflin, 1941 ). Reprinted with permission of the US Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Collection [ Reproduction No. LC-USF342-T01-008169-A ].
The photograph on page sixty-one is by Jun Fujita, courtesy of the Graham and Pamela Lee collection.
For their fortifying generosities, the author would like to thank: