“The tropic foliage of Anna Journey’s book is so lushly ashimmer with invitation and threat that it’s difficult to tell the two apart. Which is just what this poet intends: the world seduces us to enter, and to enter again, and to do so is both to find pleasure and to perish into a field of ghosts. Sexy, baroque, and southern to the core, this is a full-tilt splash of a debut.”

— Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

“Anna Journey has talent to burn: gothic, elegiac, and celebratory by turns, her poems possess a giddy imaginative dexterity that is exceedingly rare in a debut collection. More important, there is a gravity and heft to her poems; they are willing to confront the Big Issues and militantly resist the easy tour de force. Jarrell says somewhere that a certain helplessness before her material is one of the poet’s principal tools. I hear that haunted helplessness in lines such as these: ‘I can’t stop— / the story // going like the tongue goes: // lit and loosed, moving, / like Lucifer, / down.’ Anna Journey is on the threshold of a significant career.”

— David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems

“In her spellbinding debut collection, Journey is the voice of that ‘adorable siren’ whose pleasurably startling images and exquisite perfect-pitch language recognize—no, bless—that all ‘cries want to be something else.’ It is simply one of the most magnetic books I have read in a long time.”

— Beckian Fritz Goldberg, author of Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems