Tupelo Press, 2008.

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Winner of the Snowbound Series Chapbook Award, selected by Marie Howe

Prose poems alternate with brief lyrics to describe a narrative arc of failed and renewed romantic love—a turning inward, turning outward again, and no turning back, even in the face of loss.

Like the narcissus flower—delicate petals that bloom from a poisonous bulb, a flower named for the Greek myth of the youth who falls in love with his own reflection—the poems offer a sense of both beauty and danger. The danger of love and of love's beautiful illusions, and the beauty that's revealed after those illusions have been stripped away and what remains is the shimmer beneath the shimmering reflection, some deeper shine. Here, the meadows bare themselves to the moon, the new beloved steps out of the shadows, one enters "into a new love as into a mirror," and the mirror turns to rain.

“This beautifully produced winner of the Tupelo Snowbound Chapbook series (2007) is at once delicate and ferocious…The primarily lyric poems are laced with stunning images (of desire, of loss) that sear….There is a careful attention to the music in poems that are quietly formal and sound is primary. Woloch also manages the sense of line in prose poems — which constitute nearly a third of the book — inhabiting that mode fluidly, transendently.”  —Lynnell Edwards