Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.

Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.

Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist.