Often dark, with a concise and compelling style, this collection of poems brings together a variety of voices--dodos and wallpaper chant obsessively, a pair of shoes haunts a murderer's moll, a cheese weeps for the calf whose milk it stole, an army cook laments the dead, and a woman turned into soap dreams of her apotheosis as she washes into the sea. Combining the experimental with the traditional, this compilation sets poems of war against poems of the natural world. With a language that is strident, voluptuous, contemplative, and furious, these lyrical poems emphasize the domestic and the personal: children, spouses, and busy lives.