In Once Familiar, Colorado poet Barbara Ford surveys the human landscape with her small binoculars. She looks in closets for the impossibly lost and the second smile. She pricks her finger with the eye of a needle, dares to seek transcendence while smoking a cigarette, fails to wash away the stain of sacrificial blood. In this collection of poetry she holds a series of conversations standing in the quicksand of the past and the ever so slippery present. Each poem finds its place in the heart of the reader who cherishes the interplay between the known and the never-to-be-known, and those who ponder the difference between understanding and acceptance, which the poet repeatedly discovers are not the same thing at all.