From the publisher: The title of this collection suggests sustenance, and the poetry within certainly supplies that; but it is more an account of the journey itself, the journey of an accomplished poet back through her life’s work. In her preface Ruth Thompson admits that what she first conceived as a conventional “new & selected” volume became something else once she allowed her poems to become what they needed to be, sometimes radically different from how they began, and to “gather themselves into their own pattern” so that “In the end, this book has become a memoir of sorts, a final dance with some old and new poems, and a late-in-life reflection on the journey that brought me here.” This process is thus like the experience of the women she describes in her poem “Journeying West” across the prairie, a trail marked by the things abandoned along the way as unnecessary burdens, “the broken axles of memory and desire” until “in the end / women leave behind everything / but what is in their heads.” What is left in Ruth Thompson’s head is the bread of poetry, and it is sustenance indeed.