“I can’t / go back, but I may return” says Shannon Tate Jonas, of a hometown about to be buried under a lake, and in many ways, this is a poetry of return, to a loved rural landscape, blue mountains, the New River, nine crows that “yonder rouse & spread outward.”  More crucially, it is a deeply inward poetry reckoning intricately with memory and loss, as well as the vital mystery of the (short-)lived moment.  Or as Jonas beautifully puts it, “I open the windows & mind / the whispers & breathing I hear outside.”