A kinetic new poetry collection that sings our astonishment and our fear at how life makes and unmakes us through every love and every grief.

These poems are at once plangent and wise, fired by exacting observation of the changes that mark the natural world—the diminishing woods, the surging birdsong in spring–as well as each stage of human life. The poet struggles to understand what her experiences mean, even as a sudden turn—a mother’s illness, a father’s death—sweeps her in an entirely different direction.

Philips writes of “this borrowed ground,” our trespass on the earth none of us can own. In every movement of these poems as they flow over rough ground and smooth, there’s the thrill of discovery, and the echoing notes of what we can’t know, the mystery of changes yet to come.