The second collection by the award-winning poet Joanna Rawson, whose "intense language recalls the hothouse prose of Cormac McCarthy" ("Kirkus Reviews") "The sky threatens to answer a prayer but then won't. It is not exactly our own minds we go out of." -from "The Insurgency" A man's sister sews him into a bus seat. Stowaway immigrants suffocate in a crowded boxcar. The first female suicide bomber passes through a checkpoint. Joanna Rawson's "Unrest" shows the fervent, if not desperate, side of humanity pressed to the limits. With a resonant lyricism and profound beauty, these poems are restless meditations on American life, political borders, lawlessness, parenthood, and the spaces where the natural world and human turmoil come into conflict. Here is the voice of the poet at one moment in contemplation and at the next in emotional outcry, stuttering into song. Joanna Rawson is the author of a previous poetry collection, "Quarry," winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry. She lives in Northfield, Minnesota. A man's sister sews him into a bus seat. Stowaway immigrants suffocate in a crowded boxcar. The first female suicide bomber passes through a checkpoint. Joanna Rawson's "Unrest" shows the fervent, if not desperate, side of humanity pressed to the limits. With a resonant lyricism and profound beauty, these poems are restless meditations on American life, political borders, lawlessness, parenthood, and the spaces where the natural world and human turmoil come into conflict. Here is the voice of the poet at one moment in contemplation and at the next in emotional outcry, stuttering into song. "Each open flower is an overthrow. Every instance of birdsong decries the cruel suicides. In Joanna Rawson's Unrest, nothing less than the entire world is at risk--risk of catastrophe, risk of both hellish and heavenly transformations. With visionary ardor, with devotional precision, Rawson is writing poetry addressed to our deepest concerns."--Donald Revell "Joanna Rawson's poems tend toward the immediate, her shattered narratives describing a landscape that is swollen and overripe, ready to burst. These are violent poems, not in the sense of voyeurism or titillation, but in terms of a society on the brink of coming apart: the detonation of the pastoral, erotic affairs heading for annihilation, transcendence laced with despair and resignation."--Arthur Vogelsang