Nikky Finney is a true weaver of words, weaving them into beautiful images in her poetry that are vibrant and alive, and leave me breathless at times. In poems like "Orangerie" Finney creates beautiful, lush and sensual images by using descriptions of food, like fruits and sweets. The poem is dedicated "(for V)," which also happens to be symbolic of the pelvic region and the first letter in the word "vagina." This made me wonder if "V" was an actual person or if it was meant to be an ambiguous sexual reference. The poem also includes a Rumi quote at the beginning that references both the beauty and the sacred in sharing ones body with another. The dual pleasures and bodily hungers of sex and food wound beautifully together into three parts, with part I representing flirtation and foreplay:

"...pieced of figsuckle,
orange, the twice-licked skin of key limes
breath of peppermint..."

Then the deliciously lush sexual landscape she creates in part II that takes us all through the night and into sleep:

"The long twin inches of my hands take the
whole night to ski the two pineapple halves
of you;brown baklava pieced over a caramel
cooler of skin..."

The physical and emotional need to sometimes be bare and to mix ourselves with another, skin boundaries disappearing into one another, trying to achieve that life-affirming connection, with a soul on earth:

"...two perfect halves of pink grapefruit,
skinned, twelve times crushed to velvet, lifted,
assumed to the inside flesh of new coconut."

And into morning and more lingering passion:

"What assuaged the purple hills all night, all the way
to the tea blue sea, cooling the fruit floating there,
twister of raw sugar, cubed, then row after row, ginger,
grated, peeled, dried, tangling tango of tongues."

In a sea of people where one can float seemingly alone for years, Finney writes about finding the rare, deep, soul-satisfying, sight-restoring, connection with another human being that can heal the isolation  of being alive:

"We wrap each other down, around, become
ground cover for every lonely night that ever was"

I loved so many of these poems, it is difficult to narrow it down to a few. I loved the still beauty of the language in "Alice Butler"

"...she taps, breaking the air into baby blue shards..."

And her pre-verbal accounting of memory in another of my top favorites, "Penguin, Mullet, Bread" where again it is about the life giving nourishment of food, this time mother to child. It is written with the same tenderness, sensuality and beauty of "Orangerie." The intimate connection of mother and child during the feeding process and the careful preparation of the food by the mother so that the child can live and grow and flourish.

So many references to both homecoming and leaving. The collection begins with a return home for a visit in "Resurrection of an Errand Girl:An Introduction," where the narrator returns home and is asked to pick up fish from the fish market of her childhood. Following the instructions of her mother on what is tossed away and kept by the fishmonger when bringing it home for the family. She makes her own decisions now, no longer a child but a grown woman who has agency over her life:

"She knows what a blade can reveal and destroy. She has come
to use life's points and edges to uncover life's treasures. She would rather be the
one deciding what she keeps and what she throws away."

The collection ends with the next to the last poem, "Head Off & Split" with a description of the difficulty of leaving after the visit is complete, leaving so much unspoken. Leaving parents that are aging, that will never see grandchildren from the "only daughter."

This collection is just simply achingly beautiful in so many different ways.