This is Jeanne E Clark's first collection of poetry. The reader is transported to Ohio's vast middle farmland, inescapable and without end, where her poems testify to the vulnerability of damaged souls and the incandescent reprieve of a moment's desire. In this landscape -- on the outskirts of a small Ohio town, or in a prison hidden far back from the road -- we find characters like inmate Joe Silver, prison school-teacher Quinn Margaret, and her sister Lucy Electa, who is "nylon / On the move". Common objects like a Bel-Air station wagon and "summer squash that in one day / Outgrows the garden" inhabit a world that vibrates with a sinister hum, becoming the combustible centre of an otherwise ordinary life where everyone, even in this flat country of distant families, has the sudden potential to catch fire.