"Alexander Joseph has added great depth to poetry’s snowpack at 9,000 feet in these Indian Peaks. His cold meltings wildflower the thoughts of an earned solitude. He wears the mood of weathers like a favorite sweater. In these days of pandemic and war-threat stress these wonderful prose poems remind us to look up and within the healing of a life lived close to Mother Nature." —Mike Parker, author of Kimono Mountain

"In these, the strangest of times, Alexander Shalom Joseph has lashed himself to the mast, apertures jammed wide open and utterly permeable to our careening world." —Logan Hebner, author of “Southern Paiute: a Portrait,” and Director of the Zion Canyon Mesa Residency Center

"Perhaps now it can be no other way: the poem that praises the founding of a house is also the elegy that mourns the same house’s loss.So it is we have a small book that honors the fire we live by—the sun—and knows other fires threaten opposite ends. The conflagration. By the light of one fire, we gather together a life; by the light of another, we gather every object of care we can hold, and then we run. I suspect many readers of this volume will be sure to gather it—a little good company by which to build the next house, and the next world." —Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk