Susan Gordon's extraordinary language conveys us through death to dissolution and transfiguration, as she bears careful, caring witness to the body of a belly-shot doe day after day, week after week, month after month, through all seasons of the weather and the soul. Time and again precise description breaks open into transcendent vision; beauty entwines with horror, both driving towards the "unraveling / of what comes / after everything has been undone." This is a masterpiece, a poem I will cherish and revisit for many years. --Jo Radner, author of Yankee Ingenuity on CD, Professor of Literature Emerita, American University, and Storyteller