Selected for publication in the National Poetry Series by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer, Terry Ehret's first book explores her sense of estrangement from needs and desires, and often from her own body as she struggles for identity and definition and the continual recreation of self in intimacy, in motherhood and in language. She comes into language as if wading into a foreign element, walking "the boundary between the dead and the silence of her ordinary life", taking the reader into myth memory, dream, sexual desire, and in the final section, through an imaginative interpretation of ancient hieroglyphic text. If H. D. had been a language poet, she might have written something like this.