“These landscapes, these characters, this prose, my god, it grabs you and it doesn’t let you go.” —Kevin Wilson, author of NOTHING TO SEE HERE

“In sharp, precise prose, Ewing renders hardscrabble stories that remind equally of Annie Proulx and Denis Johnson. These are Polaroids collected on a shelf, forgotten, and then viewed again to tell of the lives they once lovingly chronicled—now dusty, scratched, lost. The effect is magnificent.” —Christian Kiefer, author of PHANTOMS

Because “the past denies that one long night ago it was the future,” Ewing’s collection speaks to timelessness as both conqueror & protector. In well-drawn scenes, the poems evoke a natural world at odds with humanity & the violences that accrue when the two intersect. Each poem is mired in suspense, waiting: for death—or worse, for catastrophic failures to occur that will render the world unalterably changed. Grappling with time & mortality & loss, Ewing honestly & deftly renders a present in which there is much to be mourned because there is much to love, even that which, once witnessed, is shed as “living ash floating up and up and up.”

– Chelsea Dingman