The poems in Vando's second collection craft a world of shadows: the remnants of Europe in the wake of World War II, the Vietnam soldier haunted haunted by the photograph of a child, and the blood tax exacted from Puerto Rican Americans during the Vietnam War. And through it all, the shadows are enhanced by the supposes: her daughter's encounter with death at the Museum of Natural History, the "untrodden route beckonign to us from the side of logic, " and Vando's own musings on life and death.