Music abides as an elemental force in the lives and situations chronicled in each of these seventeen stories and a concluding novella. The opening five stories groove to a noirish, mid-century jazz idiom, and the twelve middle stories develop as movements in an interconnected symphony of frustrations and felicities, while the novella charts in detail the pre-and-post Covid inner life of a boomer poet struggling obsessively with her bulimia and professional career aspirations. What all the characters share is a desire to follow Emerson's advice to "make much of your own place.