“Pattiann Rogers says she wants to discover the spiritual attributes of contemporary cosmology—to make time and geology perceptible to the heart. From chick peas through hermit crabs all the way up to the Milky Way, she visually consumes all of nature, as if each eyeball blink seals a rapturous image on her brain. . . . Her words create nature, as she promises, and nature surely created her.”

“When a poet spills her secrets, that’s a special gift. . . . Pattiann Rogers seeks to situate, in plain words, the genesis of her poetry, an experience she handles with aplomb even while it lays her open. . . . Much of Rogers’s poetry has fixed on natural history and notions of place, giving praise to creature and landscape, deciphering how she will act honorably with them without sermonizing or sanitizing.”

“A trained zoologist, Pattiann Rogers brings a scientist’s eye to her poetry, often with startlingly beautiful results. As she creates a poem, she says, the poem also creates her. Rogers’s prose flows in and out of the poems, making the book a gentle primer not only on reading her poetry but on reading poetry in general.”