In this volume, award-winning poet Elizabeth Socolow gives expression to the dislocation of a woman poet in her early forties-giving her sons to the world after having lost her marriage and its ready companionship of family life. In these poems the speaker often stands, startled, noticing some change in weather or emotion or expectation. They are especially internal and transitional, personal in that sense, but at the same time often outward-looking, a person used to sharing a life entering newly into conversation, like Emily Dickinson, with anything at all that comes to her in her world.