Chaos and calamity abound in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm, and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way--all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of toads, ice on the beach ("dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic"). Bracken may run wild across the planet "waiting for the moment/to pounce on the accident/of the discarded match" but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they have inherited. This is a collection of raw, distressed, and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat.