The title poem begins this glossy collection with an ode to joie de vivre; “Accept connection,” Sarai says. “Art begins in light’s breathy/ slink through slats, ‘cross floors, covers, morn,” she continues. “Hear it in a tenor sax./Count Basie’s band. Always hip and never late.” She concludes, “If you need more, I can’t help you.” The final line reverberates on many levels—not just a call for self-sufficiency, but also a guide on how to read Sarai’s work—it will be sparse, stripped down, it will, at times, require work, not that that’s a bad thing.

In “Remorse,” Sarai riffs on the story of Cain; “We’ve all killed our brother,” she says. “The dead roam through us.” Sarai can stop the reader cold with powerful lines such as this; “Love is a warning,” she says, in “The Blood of Billy Bob Thornton,” “I can lift you, it pleads./Don’t ignore my offer.” In “Or Maybe the Crossing Will be Easy,” on the other hand, she reminisces about good times; “…the border guard…asked/ what we’d done in Tijuana. Sir—/I said. We had a good meal—/I held aloft a gold-stamped cover/ and pages gilt-edged for inspection/ --and I have the Good Book./ He waved us to California.” Later, she muses on death: “…may a guard of sparkling comet tails/ wave me past life’s last periphery./ But first, more years of chili’s red/ and green, of friends and confusion” she says.

Sarai frequently references pop culture and cultural figures, but grounds her work with revelation and emotional underpinning. “Long Distance” concerns a daughter dealing with a dying mother. “My Various and Sloppy Forgiveness” is a poem of overcoming anger. “You Say You Did” is a tragic poem about blame and memory; “My face fell in,” the poem begins. “Cancer nibbled/ from my jaw up/ for twenty years./ Christian Science/failed me.” The speaker blames the practitioners of Christian Science for not warning her, and finally turns her accusations on her family, “You girls, you didn’t/ try to stop me,” she says. “You say you did?” the narrator continues, lost and confused. “I don’t recall,” she says, “I’m eighty-one. I’m so ashamed.” It’s a powerful indictment of the failures of faith as well as being a somewhat hollow “I-told-you-so.”