A spare, unsettled collection that circles damage without theatrics.

Willard’s poems move through memory, inheritance, and the small violences embedded in ordinary life. Images recur with quiet insistence. Syntax stretches, contracts, then tightens again. The poems often feel as if they’re trying to hold something still long enough to name it — and discovering that naming changes it.

Part of the New California Poetry series. A compact, serious collection from a press that backs its poets carefully.