In a world that does its best to catch you in its swirl of brokenness and despair, telling us our lives are meager things, without hope for wholeness, Michael L. Newell's book, sets forth a different story. Newell's poems don't deny pain, loss. Neither do they ignore people's indifference to suffering. Instead, we find in Newell's voice how to embrace the sorrows, how to receive them as music, and to continue opening ourselves to the wonder of being. A young athlete on the basketball court, secret lovers in a park, city streets, an old man at river's edge, a walk in the rain, the poems in this volume encompass the world. A prolific poet who has lived on several continents, Michael L. Newell has closely observed the world in its myriad varieties of difficulty and challenge. In the music of a fiddler, ragged blues, the moan of a horn, in the voice of one who has opened his heart to the passage of time with its laughter, mistakes, weariness, mysteries, and dreams, Newell's poems in shows us how the bent and crooked things of the world can be transformed into song. Who wouldn't want to embrace such a gift? --Anna Citrino, .