A debut poetry collection, both lyrical and surprisingly playful, about overcoming a harsh evangelical upbringing and seeking consolation from the beauty of the natural world.

This collection by the author of three books of nonfiction takes readers into one man's struggle to escape the corrosive effects of a punishing religion. We meet the small, frightened boy afraid of hell-fire and eternal guilt, and decades later, the man kicking free of the habit of self-excoriation.

There is humour in the observation of the antics of birds, especially magpies and other corvids, and profound humility in the struggle to resist a confining culture.

Magpie, I love you more for your flight and strut than for your squawk,

but can't vilify a creature ten times tougher than I am and a hell of a lot more handsome.

We walk with the poet-as-flaneur through neighbourhoods and along the river in a small prairie city, observing the incongruities, absurdities, and startling images and sounds of city life. And as the mystic who believes in something far beyond himself, so the beetle he sees on a path is "a little Buddha," and the wind and the flowing river are "irresistible forces," while a pine teaches him "how you move / without going / anywhere."