The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid's Tale "brings a swift, powerful energy" to this "intimate and immediate" poetry collection (Publishers Weekly). These beautifully crafted poems, by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate, are some of Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile works. Some draw on history and some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive. "Intimate and immediate." - Publishers Weekly "The vein of grieving that moves through this book like a dark tracer runs purest in a series of elegiac poems about the death of the poet's father." - Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle "Atwood's savage, back-talking monologues have become her trademark…Her range is darkened and deepened with a series of elegiac poems about her dying father, and she, the speaker, the daughter, faces the inevitable fall into the future from which her wit and magic can't save her. We know Atwood is a prolific novelist. Remember also her poetic voice." - Molly Bendall, The Antioch Review