"These poems are so bright they hurt: urgent and necessary, they explode and shatter into original wholeness, reclaiming for Soul its own language-fierce, challenging, and spare. This is a book Emily would have kept by her bedside. About it, she might have said, 'Here is a newness in the wind to trouble your attention.'"-Susan Mitchell In the Book of Genesis, Noah sends forth a raven and a dove to test the status of the flood. The return of the dove is widely celebrated, but the fate of the raven-the bird who speaks-is left ambiguous. In Christina Davis' luminous first collection of poems, her questions are those raised by the journey of the raven and what he represents: language and communication, risk, exile and mortality. "Nostalgia for the Infinite" "Each time we moved, " "I wanted to come back as a tree. And each time we stayed, as a bird." "Does anyone ever ask to return as himself again?" "I wanted to be a tree and myself-seeing-the-tree, " "a bird and myself-being-the-bird." "O creatures-in-law" Christina Davis holds an MA from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Her poems and reviews have been published widely, and she is the editor of "Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing."The recipient of residencies to Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the MacDowell Colony, and the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain, she is associate director of the NYU Creative Writing Program.