You'll be Fast as Lightning Coveting my Painted Tail

In this sixth collection, Toni Thomas's poems inhabit a world where love is a subversion of slinky dresses, strangers live in our shoes, sea merchants wander, jewels grow on the leafless tree, where permeable girls disappear summer evenings, dangle their legs when the tongue of the river can't get enough of them, where longing and the sacred turn out to be more or less the ransom of honey.When I cross the path to happinesswill it speak to me as a snake devouring the mouse in the fieldor bend me into another kind of beingwho hears the collapse of the windthe sun's vigilancelozenges hopeknows the climate ofher own burning?