V. Penelope Pelizzon's magnificent poems are epyllions, 'little epics, ' that synthesize a stunning breadth of experience. Their geographical circuit--from Brooklyn to Africa to the Middle East--provides the backdrop for candid meditations on time and mortality, agency and accident. Like Elizabeth Bishop, that other consummate traveler, Pelizzon riffs on 'assurance / of ruin's recurrence' Awful but cheerful.--Ange Mlinko, author of Distant Mandate

Pelizzon's virtuosity underpins a collection that is urgent and elegiac, hilarious and harrowing, its detours into memory as vividly realized as the author's obvious joy in literature and life.--Ned Balbo, Literary Matters

This is a brilliant book. I love its variety of forms and music, its humor and intellectual seriousness (how often does one actually learn things from poems?), its high-spirited embrace of life. This is a book I will keep close over the years.--Christian Wiman, author of Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair

Elegies, romances, eco grief, comedies, recipes, histories, and keen instruction: these poems hold the world in their lines. V. Penelope Pelizzon is a poet like no other, straddling centuries and continents with every brilliant line.--Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade

Like Tennyson's Ulysses, V. Penelope Pelizzon is a part of all that she has met. With inexhaustible interest in the world and in the Aristotelian activity of living, she is a permanent student of people and other complex systems--cultures and landscapes, nations, economies, and empires, families, a garden, her dog, herself--and of how they are conceived, brought to term, nurtured, and mourned for. Pelizzon has the impartial eye of a naturalist and the pliant mind of a philosophical pragmatist but venerates words and word sounds and the figurative imagination like a true neo-Romantic. The result is an original, perspective-altering poetic sensibility that can be devastating, funny, hopeful, absurd, or attuned to the surprising harmonies of real experience.--Joshua Mehigan, author of Accepting the Disaster

'What a curator the mind is, ' writes Pelizzon of her 'scrappy cabinets of curiosities, ' these poems that feel inlaid with acacia, ivory, and swarms of silver bees and wrapped in rarest silks, redolent of spice and tea and good old human sweat. I dazzled at the music and utter brilliance of this collection.--D. A. Powell, author of Repast: Tea, Lunch, Cocktails

Delight is the dominant mood in the book. Pelizzon seems to find the world (and the words that describe it) irresistibly interesting, even at its worst.-- "On the Seawall"

These are poems haunted by climate collapse and personal mortality, but also rich in music.-- "Times Literary Supplement"