This title is 1997 winner of Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry. 'A quest, not for fickle happiness, whose pursuit is unworthy, but joy, more durable and much harder won' - Robert A. Fink. 'A wild, wild ride. Fierce and chancy, passionate and bawdy, Margaret Benbow's exuberant first book is nothing short of rapturous, enrapturing...She's drawn to the hot, the dangerous, the lush, the profuse. Given the choice of angel or bogeyman, she'll take the bogeyman every time' - Ronald Wallace. How to tell a bird of prey. Girls weighing less than a hundred pounds, girls who look as though they were raised on milk veal and summer wine, can chew down through the roof and devour whole families. This one wants the man: rank and sexy as an old bobcat. She likes his face, that mess of big prize vegetables with rooty beard and spud chin, red onion cheeks and hot toad tongue: wonderful things might happen, she reflects, if I kiss a toad. She doesn't see his nose, that crackbrain crackheart beak. She doesn't mark his gaze, beautiful blood in the raptor's eye.