"In Liz Howard's wild, scintillating debut, the mechanisms we use to make sense of our worlds -- even our direct intimate experiences of it -- come under constant scrutiny and a pressure that feels like love. What Howard can accomplish with language strikes us as electric, a kind of alchemy of perception and catastrophe, fidelity and apocalypse. The waters of Northern Ontario shield country are the toxic origin and an image of potential. A subject, a woman, a consumer, a polluter; an erotic force, a confused brilliance, a very necessary form of urgency -- all are loosely tethered together and made somehow to resonate with our own devotions and fears; made "to be small and dreaming parallel / to ceremony and decay." Liz Howard was born and raised in northern Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Puritan, and Matrix Magazine. She works as a Research Officer in cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto"--Provided by publisher.