As Anita Sullivan’s lines sing, we awaken to our own shape-shifting, our own evolving, our own stretch toward mysterious chords. In her garden, or on a Greek isle, this poet knows that every house is an entire world. Peggy Shumaker (author of Gnawed Bones)

If, as I believe, every story has a poem in its heart, then these poems are the hearts of larger stories. The poems came together into this book because most of them were inhabited in some way by animals – dogs, horses, birds, and even imaginary beasts whose heads are large and out of control. Stories come from individual minds, but they also float freely in the world along a kind of universal story grid. I think it’s a good idea to add new material to this grid now and then, ancient and powerful as it remains.