This poetry collection was written during the time when the author spent a winter teaching in South Dakota - as such, it's impregnated with impressions of the prairie in winter. There's a lot of imagery spent on snow and wind and stars and blue light, and even more on driving through this frigid landscape. (I didn't count how many poems involved roads or highways, but there were a lot.) This meant that, even though I liked the poems individually, they could sometimes feel repetitive and began to blur together.

The poems I liked best were often focused less on that icy landscape in itself, and more on social issues such as poverty, especially as it related to farming and food and heating in such chilly environments. There was a paragraph-long reflection on Alice Walker's writing that made me gasp (you can find it immediately following the January 18 marker), and a small handful of poems about space exploration and the Challenger explosion that I found particularly affecting.