The poems in Surrender and Resistance consider our response to the movement of fate upon our lives, the ebb and flow between our willingness to embrace and our determination to reject what seemingly simply happens regardless. Connecting personal cycles of surrender and resistance to the universal, Fewster-Yan employs imagery from both the natural world of plants and animals and from the narratives of Classical myth and fairy tales. While her fate-frustrated Penelope speaks of “that awful and inevitable hope—/ to be endured with due grave caution,” Fewster-Yan’s poems hold open the possibility for a kind of endurance that is neither cheat nor resignation, but simply human.