This debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. By the end, we feel we have been witness to a poet remaking herself. Gonzalez's poetry depicts the fullness of living. There are the small moments: "white wine greening in a glass," trumpet blossoms "panicking across the garden." Some poems adopt the oracular quality of a parable but invariably refuse a clear moral. The poet moves through elegy, romantic and sexual encounters, family history, and place – Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio – all constellated in "a chaos of faraway." The collection is held together less by answers than by a persistent question: How doe you reconcile a hatred for the world's pain with a love for that same world, which is indivisible from its worst aspects?