Poetry. Braiding narratives that sing and songs that speak multiple points of view, Ragan creates the at-sea world of those who leave one culture for another, one language for another. She shows how one human experience ultimately mirrors what it means to be human in any time, any place. [READING THE GROUND] will seize your attention and repay you on every page. These poems give us 'Lessons in the Slovak Language'--which is to say, lessons in every mother's tongue. They rise out of the great American tale of immigration, embrace the great American mill-town of the twentieth century, and make the great American journey to an unknown old country that grants us far more than nostalgia, more even than the blaze-crush of 1969's Prague Spring. Ragan's consummately woven text is a 21st century book: a brilliant meta-poem; a double- helix of artful words; a gathering that satisfies, sings, erupts.--Jeanne Larsen