Inara Cedrins brings a painter's eye to her poetry. In this collection a still life blooms into narrative, narrative freezes for a moment into portrait and metaphor becomes a bowl of fruit waiting for the perfect light. As Cedrins says, "fences sprawl dizzy between chloroform and clarity." These are also the poems of a world traveler, a searcher both at home and not at home in places as diverse as Middle America and Central Europe, equally at home and not at home in a broken-down motel and a Venetian casino. Inara Cedrins is a poet at home both in the surfaces of the world and in the soul beneath the surfaces as she explores life at "the edge of a wave / like gold-green pressed glass / against the deepening blue force of the storm."