How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Nida Sophasarun's <i>Novice</i> traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother's body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in Asia and the American South, <i>Novice </i>proposes that home is monumental and ruined, remembered and forgotten, local and diffuse, peopled and haunted.