<p>In this sixth collection, Toni Thomas&#39;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&#39;t get enough of them, where longing and the sacred turn out to be more or less the ransom of honey.</p><p><em>When I cross the path to happiness</em></p><p><em>will it speak to me as a snake </em></p><p><em>devouring the mouse in the field</em></p><p><em>or bend me into another kind of being</em></p><p><em>who hears the collapse of the wind</em></p><p><em>the sun&rsquo;s vigilance</em></p><p><em>lozenges hope</em></p><p><em>knows the climate of</em></p><p><em>her own burning?</em></p>