"Virginia Smith Rice has created a tremblingly precise, intricate, bright-edged evocation of a world both ecstatic and ominous, grieving and vital, broken and mending, but rarely mended. Her poems are richly colored and intensely focused on the shapes and forms of the world and of inner life and relationships. They are crowded with living plants and creatures and intense feeling, and Rice can even describe the color of solitude. Her language is sensuously complex, her angle of vision is oblique and finds the memorable touch of reality off-center, at the edges, just this side of perceptibility. She has created a delicate yet vivid response to what she calls the 'percussed absence' that haunts human life. This is a marvelous first book." 
-Reginald Gibbons 
 
Virginia Smith Rice is the author of When I Wake It Will Be Forever (Sundress Publications, 2014) and the poetry chapbook, Whose House, Whose Playroom (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Collaborative poems, co-written with Christine Pacyk, appear in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and are collected in the chapbook, The Internet Confirms How They Broke Down The Door, forthcoming in 2020 from Dancing Girl Press.