It is exactly "here"--never at a comfortable distance, never without the risk of immediacy's chaos--that Barbara Tomash writes. "[H]ere in alert/misunderstanding, a glance into green watching movement..." She is able to create with language an experience of the suspension of perception that is insight--the shock of harkening, of attuning to the world's endless oscillations. With Tomash, we come, for an instant, unraveled of our preconceptions. That the word "green" in her sentence can be read as noun, but also as adjective for a kind of "watching," lets us glimpse imagination altered in its act of alertness. Tomash is generous in her observation of experience, its delicate, intriguing, frightening, beguiling permutations--be it presenting itself today as a "father [who] leaves his handgun unattended" or "trees in the distance like black wishbones."

—Rusty Morrison