In this brilliant collection, Mark Dickinson ranges - with a passionate, weary restlessness - over bird, plant, monetary, sexual, and internet networks, but mocks any easy connection between these. His tone varies from lovingly intimate to bitingly witty, picking up language from taxonomic systems, social media, travel and nature writing, but all the while retaining a lyric intensity and sense of dynamic, layered, threatened living spaces. We feel, powerfully, the search for values we might live by, but the work demonstrates again and again that this is hard to come by: 'Gathering a sense of love from a hole of black earth is dark dark, & everything is leaving'. -Harriet Tarlo