Darwin's Breath

The poems in Darwin's Breath ponder fossils embedded into earth's oldest mountains, explore thoughts of the mockingbird with her distinct cells "rising on the wind," travel through memories of a childhood in government housing, a period when the poet's father worked at factories where uranium was enriched for the first atomic bomb and her mother peeled pot after pot of potatoes. Gardens bind the book's sections, those from childhood where the father bent to his tasks despite sunburned head and shoulders, and the gardens that the poet tended, all places where the gardener "dedicated the holiness of labor." A sense of reverence and gratitude permeates the poems--awe at the way stars hurl their flames "through the vacuum of space," at the permanence of rocks, the mysteries of birth and death, and gratefulness for the gift of each new day, each season rolling into another season.