In Memoirs of an Almost Expedition, Barbara Schott peels back the skin of language to reveal its musculature, its bone. She also peels back the skin of relations, the intimate rub of self against self, to find both great longing and great loss. Schott marks how the heart bends to words, bends itself with words, in her poetic novel Archipelago her marvelous sequence hymens and in each discrete poem in this lovely book.