"When an avid reader of contemporary poetry discovers a book so full of warmth and eloquent exactitude, she is grateful and excited to read more by the author. This was my first experience of reading Joseph Bathanti's fourth book of poems, This Metal. I felt humbled by reading a poet whose voice was strong, but I was simultaneously dazzled by a vocabulary rich in metaphor and inflected by the language of faith and place." From the Introduction, by Mary Jo Bona