This book is an open door to a land full of stories that go like this: "Faerie tales found themselves in the real world by mistake, cannot help believing that the Happy Ending Myth owes them." Written over the course of four years in Santa Cruz, California, this is a collection of poetry and prose, field notes from the backcountry of a wandering mind. It ranges from our world-with its absurd beauty and hungry dark, its overflow and subtle lack-to other worlds that feel familiar in spite of their strangeness. It invites these worlds into our own, blurs the lines between them until it takes only a certain sleight-of-heart to leave behind the hard edges of the factual. These poems waver between devastated and delighted, wild and wilt. Welcome to a campfire by the side of a long-forgotten trail, and a moon that might have slipped through the horizon's seams, a visitor from a different sky. Here a young boy in the cold north learns to be more than human; he moves through the world like a bullet through a painting. A nineteen-year-old wonders what to say to keep his younger sister from self-harm in a culture of shiny surfaces and internalized oppression. Old and unraveling, a drunken Peter Pan dreams of flying. A boy takes a walk through the overgrown, ruined buildings of the Epilogue, after an apocalypse as slow and uneventful as the coming of middle age. The author opens himself like a chrysalis, and out steps a sunrise.