Collecting his recent essays with a few new poems and ‘stretchers’, Don McKay builds upon his decades-long exploration of poetry and its relationship to the world. Whether he’s paying tribute to poets Margaret Avison and Joanne Page, cracking wise about the impropriety of the F-word interrupting a consonant cluster, contemplating our relationship to the obscure worlds of fossils and lichens, or laying bare his own staggering grief, McKay’s wily notion of poetry resists the anthropoid urge to name or map with certainty the things we pursue, reinvigorating our capacity for wonder.