In “skyscrape,” the poet guides us to a table where we might sit with the ghosts of both our futures and our past, even a past we might have felt complicit with in its terrible violence toward the human. Despite the more limited space of a chapbook, these poems unfurl a sky stretching to include Japanese internment camps, histories of war, lynching, burning crosses, and bodies trying to figure out who and what they are. Just as the lenses of a camera focus, so the poems aspire to render images “with [a] fine gradation of tones,” though we “cannot unsee what must have once hung// from [the] tree.” Formally satisfying and clearly cadenced, the language of these poems works on piecing “myths…into a history,” and hunts for traces of light that won’t “[burn] the whole/ house down.”

- Luisa A. Igloria, Poet Laureate of Virginia