"Shea stretches the possibilities of experience/interpretation to include not only the phantasmic and catastrophic, but the most mundane. How else to counter the nihilism inherent in the excruciating human project of dreaming, believing, needing illusion? The poet finds starlight in the wreckage, witnesses it behind layers of glass--some shattered, some magnifying--and makes a humble assemblage of letters to face death with. This book is mysteriously pure. It knows that the puzzling moment needs no solution--the moment, the only one anyone has, can be the last day, or it can be a 'whole' life. This book lets one consciousness at a time talk ecstatically to time; it lets time talk dispassionately back. I'm astounded at the conversation I am in on, and more than a little afraid--irradiated."--Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize.