IT HAS BEEN MY CONTINUOUS LUCK TO HAVE TWO OLD FRIENDS as primary readers for nearly every word I’ve written, and their attention to this book both encouraged me to keep writing it, and made it better than it would have been left to my hands alone: thank you Sally Keith and Srikanth Reddy. Much of the novel was pondered and put together while running many miles with Michael Lundblad, and his patience in listening to me talk as we trained for a marathon was an attention greatly needed, and I hope reflected in the book itself. Thank you to my father, and to Agelia Dumas, for reading drafts of the book and offering support and advice in return; thank you to my mother for the same. Thank you to Chris Fischbach and everyone at Coffee House Press. Thank you to Laird Hunt for publishing Book III, Chapter 6 in the Denver Quarterly. Lastly, but a circular last so that it is always also the beginning, thank you to Iris, Hana, and Kristy, who in me exert such a tow that image reverts back to substance, and that substance is home.
The poet who falls into and through the volcano is in memory of Craig Arnold.
Many other books wend their way through the fabric of this one, a tribute and a study of those works and writers I most love. Readers of this book will find echoes in homage to Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, John Berryman, John Bunyan, T. S. Eliot, Henry David Thoreau, William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George MacDonald, Walter Benjamin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, among others.