Poetry. In language poet Laurie Lamon calls both spare and sumptuous, BOOK OF EXODUS narrates the imagined experiences of a Russian family who lived for 40 years in the Siberian taiga, utterly isolated from society. Kathryn Smith's debut collection examines wilderness, loneliness, and faith in poems that author Nance Van Winckel says allow entry, or re-entry, to primal selves, we who once roamed a forest, ate of its bounty, and fought its beasts. And yes, in the best sense, the book also seems--as a marvelous abecedarian poem's title proclaims--a 'Rehearsal for the Apocalypse.'