Jay Udall's poems reflect his individual--as well as the common experience of--personal awakening. This collection of insightful poems evokes images and memories of the places, environments, and culture through which Udall has traveled during his lifetime. His poems cross personal boundaries to express universal concepts of painful self-realization and the acceptance of a beautiful, yet harsh world. However, the world he describes is not just his own. He fantastically ventures into the skin of lions, mice, and cicadas, creating poignant metaphors of the human condition. The beauty of his work is that Udall finds personal connections and insight in the most seemingly mundane experiences of life as well as the most traumatic and extreme events. These coalesce to create an arena for us to think about our own life-realizations while joining Udall on his journey. "What a fine book of poems this is, and what a fine human being, and 'pagan, pantheistic soul, ' Jay Udall is. The poems are wide and deep, they honor the living and the dead, they tackle the minute particulars and the cosmic ones with a perfect steady unblinking deftness of language. Speaking of the mortal animal body and its brother and sister creatures, or of family, or of the sweetness and bitterness of America, Udall makes me feel grateful to be at his welcome table."--Alicia Ostriker, author of "No Heaven" and "The Book of Seventy." "Jay Udall loves both the visible and the hidden beauties of our worlds. He's neither shy nor boastful about his keen investigations into what some call the spirit worlds and others scoff at. What is his natural mediation of such a divide? Vocal riffs, improvs, and prayers, maybe, that talk to the dead, the hummingbirds, the arroyos and wind-channels, with great feeling and muscular poetry."--Judith Vollmer, author of "Reactor" and "The Door Open to the Fire"