David Wojahn is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, Icehouse Lights, Interrogation Palace, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and World Tree, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Poet's Prize. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the George Kent Memorial Prize, and the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wojahn is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

In Wojahn's fifth collection of verse—the first since the death of his wife, the poet Lynda Hull—loss and language seem both more at odds and more inseparable than ever. Here grieving is countered with long lines, loquaciousness, and the polyphonic buzz of culture; the holes in the poet's life are filled with smart, terrifying poems. Wojahn seems caught up in a maelstrom of his making, and the result is a stirring, anguished book, revealing of the poet's grief and emblematic of its cost.