"Ann Killough's voice is self-aware, skeptical, and inconsolable. With bracketed lower-case titles and long strophic lines, with fragmented echoes of the white whale and the open road, and with proliferating metaphors that question the worth and nature of metaphor itself, Killough probes the soul of twenty-first-century America and gives our own quiet desperation a name and vivid shape."-Fred Marchant This brave and remarkable debut functions as one long poem and achieves extension through Stein-like repetition, and meaning through accretion and excess. In seeking a metaphorical ideal, Ann Killough's struggle to write is a struggle to understand her feelings for her nation-a process akin to a mother learning that her child is a murderer, a truth from which there can be no refuge or respite. From " stuffed animal]": She imagined the beloved nation with its sheep's face and the other wolves around it like dependent clauses. Or the other dependent clauses around it like sheep. She could never keep straight who was who in the sentences. At times she felt like a simple noun in apposition, Red Riding Hood's grandmother hiding in the closet or the first witch with only her red shoes sticking out. Ann Killough's work has appeared in Fence, FIELD, Poetry Ireland Review, Sentence, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Sinners in the Hands: Selections from the Catalog received the 2003 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Killough lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and coordinates the Brookline Poetry Series and the Mouthful Reading Series in Cambridge.