This collection is born from James McGrath’s decades-long friendship with the Hopi and particularly with his collaborator, the artist Otellie Loloma. Rather than a memoir or narrative detailing external events, these poems are an inner testimony, enacted through rhythmic lyrics that lead us to a mythic place, a world redolent with meaning. These poems, then, are really songs, songs emerging from a primordial source. McGrath holds close to that source, achieving a timeless wholeness, a kind of ritual purification through language. Mimetic of the sacred, McGrath’s poems or songs begin to dance. The page becomes a dancing place, a plaza where gesture, image and sound meld to convey a reality as fresh as it is ancient.