With a voice both distinctive and universal, a vision both elegiac and, at times, wry, Ann Gearen takes readers into the lived lives of the famous-Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda-and of the only personally, intimately known-a mother who unexpectedly drowns herself, a desperately longed for Chinese daughter, an eighty-three-year old woman who, with failing memory and lost language, tells her grieving daughter the same story over and over. Gearen, like the Acholi peoples about whom she writes, underscores "how we all/are like the white and the yolk/of a single, fresh-cracked egg."