Throughout this debut collection, Erin Rodoni distills experience for its essence, rendered in language that is fierce, tender, penetrating in its precision, and astonishing in its turns of phrase. Whether describing “turncoat cells” of cancer, the half-smile scar of a caesarian, or the alien landscape of childhood seared by wildfire, Rodoni’s poems remind us how tenuous our lives are, how each moment arrives as inescapably painful and miraculous as birth.