“With graceful intelligence and deft play of language Jane Byers brings her entire life journey into view, from her own precarious birth through to witnessing the effects of injuries and indignities, to becoming a mother of adopted twins. Her poems are works of wonder at the resilience of the human spirit, at the fragility of recovery from trauma, at the steps of growing into love. This is a collection that takes breath as its starting metaphor and breathes the fire of excitement and admiration into the reader.”

—Maureen Hynes, author of Harm’s Way and Rough Skin, winner of the League of Canadian Poets’ 1995 Gerald Lampert Award

“Jane Byers’ poems are an incendiary experience of language, inflaming mind, heart, and embodiment. It’s a stunning debut collection of poetry, deeply queer, beautiful, and expansive.”

—Shannon Webb-Campbell, 2014 Critic-in-Residence, Canadian Women in the Literary Arts

“Jane Byers’ first collection of poetry is brave, blunt, breathtakingly rogue. Her language is precise and compelling, as are her poems, compelling as life, birth, fear, justice and strength. She is a fine poet, a poet who teaches us how to ‘breathe our way back.’”

—Arleen Paré, author of Paper Trail and Leaving Now

“Throughout the book Byers uses just the right word, line break and space to let us follow her narrative. She is generous to those who people her poems: her grandmother as an audacious young woman; women and men struggling with dangerous work; immigration. And she is generous with herself: how that first conscious breath seems to have set her on a creative path–and opened the door to steeling effects. I’m sure I’m not the only one waiting for Byers’s second collection.”

—Barbara Herringer, The Coastal Spectator