The poems included in
The Rabbits Could Sing
delve farther into territory that Amber Flora Thomas visited in her prize-winning book
Eye of Water
, showing even more clearly how “the seam has been pulled so far open on the past” that “the dress will never close.” Here, the poem acts not as a body in itself but as a garb drawn around the here and now. Loss, longing, and violation are sustenance to a spirit jarred from its animal flesh and torn apart, unsettling the reader with surprising images that are difficult to forget. The poems in
invite the reader into a world thick with the lush bounty of summer in the far north, where the present is never far from the shadow of the past.