The great strength of Chris Rainey's poetry rests on its lucid directness. The surprising range of subjects it engages, the various ways it exposes them, offer blissfully little ambiguity-though he leaves the world more richly mysterious for us than he finds it. The book is dedicated to the man who left a parcel of land, on the Palisades near the Hudson river in new Jersey, to be used as a public park. That resource has served the poet well; his work is one with it.