These diverse poems of past and present, of order and disorder, press on with the forceful explorations that Andrew Hudgins began with his first book, SAINTS AND STRANGERS, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. The wide-ranging poems in this new volume respond with passion to the natural world, to family life, to history, to inheritance: "before he flooded the rubble, he swept up the dust of Babylon / to give as presents, and he stored it in a jar.