Katerina Canyon’s poems offer intimate accounts of home as the locus of danger — and homeland as a state of oppression. They are at once urgent and mysterious, full of ocean depths and surging currents. Far from nostalgia, home inspires in this poet a vigilance, keeping watch on herself and others. Her very language is charged with the alert intelligence that offers a means of survival, and metaphors that transform pain into poetry.—Devin Johnston, author of Mosses and LichensKaterina Canyon’s poems dive into history unafraid to explore the complexity of home and family and acknowledge: the sea is filled with bones.This powerful, engaging collection where we see the billowing skirt of sunset asks again and again: How do get past our pasts?Smart, poignant, compassionate, Canyon’s poems remind us that strength happens despite one’s childhood and one’s country; they exclaim, We can choose whether we are stuck / In darkness or in light.—Kelli Russell Agodon, author ofDialogues with Rising TidesIn lush language and startling images, Katerina Canyon unveils a story in blood and bone of a speaker who survives domestic cycles of addiction and abuse, terrors handed down from the plantation through generations of her kin . . . Like the Phoenix, the speaker dares to draw near destruction to name our violent histories in order to claim a survivor’s eternal understanding of how to love, how to mother, and how to teach the world that We cannot be bound. We are free. We are infinite.—Katy Didden, author of The Glacier’s Wake