Shannon Tate Jonas writes, “How do you make a song?/ Cover the table with a white sheet/ Growl into your hands/ Write the words ‘profane’ & ‘swan’ on the mirror.” Animated by a haunted phenomenology, these poems are hardscrabble koans, deft lyric implosions, minimal and aching delineations of the materiality and inescapability of memory. Leaves appear in the shape of a hog. The tilled field is a sparrow. Darkness is essential. Among the psychic impositions and possibilities created by his sharply rendered landscapes and domestic interiors, Jonas achieves on every page a desperate beauty that few contemporary American poets attempt.