August is an insatiable month. Whether it is a dry spell, drought, or simply parched with want, or filled with thunderstorm, deluge, destruction of property or ideals, it is the place of scarcity or cloudburst, beginnings, or endings. The month of August is the focal point of what this author describes as insatiable. In these poems, she identifies the numerous places in our human experience where we face insatiability, where we are ravenous with desire for greatness, passionate for education, even if, like Vesalius, we get it wrong. We lust after partners we cannot have; yearn for true love; we are voracious for sex. We fall in love with language, buttons, umbrellas, light, and silence. We live in agony and rage at the death of a loved one, or even obsession with a child lost in the mountains whose body is never found. We are insatiable in religious belief, even when it drains us of our time, our creativity, even our own souls.

Our appetites direct our lives even if we think we have a foundation of basic beliefs to keep us afloat. In these poems, what we know and what we think we know come down to a thin string of possibility.