“When a poet spills her secrets, that’s a special gift.” —KIRKUS 

An award-winning poet, a mother, a lover of the land and every creature in it, as well as a student of zoology, the author is at home in the vocabulary of nature. In this work of prose punctuated and intensified by poetry, she describes the genesis of her most admired verse and reveals how and why she writes.

“When a poet spills her secrets, that’s a special gift. . . . Pattiann Rogers seeks to situate, in plain words, the genesis of her poetry, an experience she handles with aplomb even while it lays her open. . . . Much of Rogers’s poetry has fixed on natural history and notions of place, giving praise to creature and landscape, deciphering how she will act honorably with them without sermonizing or sanitizing.” —Kirkus 

“Pattiann Rogers deservedly receives plaudits for [her] luminous writing. . . . Rogers is a multi-talented, national treasure.” —Eugene Weekly

“A trained zoologist, Pattiann Rogers brings a scientist’s eye to her poetry, often with startlingly beautiful results. As she creates a poem, she says, the poem also creates her. Rogers’s prose flows in and out of the poems, making the book a gentle primer not only on reading her poetry but on reading poetry in general.” —Library Journal