In her first collection, Alessandra Lynch deftly combines the surreal and the lyric into a striking and confident whole. At times witty, at times dreamlike, the poems revel in dense Symbolist-like imagery, juxtaposition, wordplay, and rhyme. By refusing a certain kind of transparency—direct statement and traditional allusion—Lynch excavates the shadowy region of the psyche. From a rich profusion of images emerge themes of unrealized desire, and the ways in which we may fail to be present in our own lives or to others. The poems seek to resolve these themes, suggesting how words, in memorializing the disorientations of life, reorient us; that it is in the tokens and monuments of our failed desires, broken promises—"Sails the wind left behind"—that we are able to find ourselves.