In her third collection, Alison Stone presents us with forty-two poems of struggle and redemption. Her style is crisp and unencumbered by literary pretence. Stone evokes the raw emotions that inspired her poems with a rare honesty and clarity. Although her main theme is femininity and maternal love in a dangerous world, she takes her readers into the shared common experiences that bind us together as humans. The torment of AIDS, memories of drug abuse and the loss of loved ones provide imagistic mirrors to all human suffering in her poems. Simply put, they connect to real experience transfigured into language as experience in itself. These poems saw original publication in the best literary magazines, including Barrow Street, Poet Lore, Poetry, The Paris Review and Ploughshares. Stone's work has received the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award, Poetry's Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly's Madeline Sadin Award.