In this sixth collection, Toni Thomas’s poems inhabit a world where love is a subversion of slinky dresses, strangers live in our shoes, sea merchants wander, jewels grow on the leafless tree, where permeable girls disappear summer evenings, dangle their legs when the tongue of the river can’t get enough of them, where longing and the sacred turn out to be more or less the ransom of honey.

When I cross the path to happiness

will it speak to me as a snake

devouring the mouse in the field

or bend me into another kind of being

who hears the collapse of the wind

the sun’s vigilance

lozenges hope

knows the climate of

her own burning?