“McMorris is a poet utterly devoted to the sensual beauty of language and he crafts lines dense and strong enough to bear the crashing forces of history and identity contained within them . . . his work is wrenching, lovely, and powerfully seductive.”—Poetry Project Newsletter Within the intimate, enlightened, and dazzling linguistic flights of these poem-letters, Mark McMorris engages a world that has experienced “continuous combat since Helen gave Paris a flower / at least since the Bronze Age of Agamemnon’s armada.” Born in Jamaica, Mark McMorris has won the Contemporary Poetry Series prize and has been a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He teaches at Georgetown University where he directs the Lannan Literary Programs.