This award-winning collection simmers with wit as Brodak confronts tragedy, childhood losses, transcendent love, and the question of art itself. Tinged with a suffering--"I was the littlest wastebasket. / I was my own church. Except-- / scared, scared"--that rises above personal sorrow, her fierce and painterly poems redefine nature and art and what exists between: "Lately, there is spangled shade in my space / and a cold apple orchard to tend in place of consciousness." As Reginald Shepherd said about the poems in Brodak's first collection, the chapbook "Instructions for a Painting," her world is "'small enough / to sing in all directions, ' and large enough to take us there.