In crisp, intimate, and uncluttered language, award-winning and critically acclaimed poet Sharon Thesen gives us a layered meditation on energy and endings: the irrepressible energy of life, and the end of everything - the natural world, home, love, youth, safety, all we understand to be familiar. In an unforgettable sequence of poems on a wildfire that denudes hills around her home and forces an evacuation, Thesen brilliantly marries these preoccupations. She captures beauty at the periphery of things: a neighbour's yellow dress, a tube of Polysporin, a blue-and-white tin awning that an observer momentarily mistakes for a lake. Thesen's voice - musical, personable, alive to joy and despair in equal measure - reminds us of the spiritual yearning that can surprise any of us, even in our most mundane moments. With nods to predecessors who searched for the ideal in the local and particular - Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Berryman - The Good Bacteria is a beautiful addition to Sharon Thesen's already considerable achievements. Book jacket.