In the volume’s opening poem, The Well, the speaker announces that If inside me was a well, I didn’t know it, as she continues to look for ways to draw on her own resources to find strength. In the poem’s final lines she declares:
How I wanted to fall
over the well lip and down—
clear to the bottom—
and lean against the muscle of that throat.
Wilson probes the depths of that well in poetry, bringing up for readers the clear water of her poems’ images and observations. When “The Dream Women Called” asks, What cures a body / caving in on its emptiness, // what closes the long cut of fear, the speaker answers that she wants
A life that’s substantial:
satin, silk, something
the hand is drawn to.
Readers hold in this impressive book a substantial life in their own hands, the satin and silk of these poems offering substance for living deeply and honestly.