"In cultivating her obsessions, Reed unearths the historical behind the personal, the silences behind speech, and the sweetness behind hard-earned bitterness. In clear, attentive language, she evokes the sensory world of earliest childhood (before one is thought to remember) and of the deathbed, the transient moments "glassy and brief-a wingbeat" that haunt those left behind. Holding the world and the past in her gaze as she wanted to be held as a child-"I eat it all, meat, pith, seeds"-Reed makes us believe in metaphors as a source of healing."-Rebecca Starks, author of Fetch, Muse