"All earthly things carry secrets," Law tells us with this story, and the story is heavy with secrets in the way that even a small rock is heavy if held for too long. The story is heavy until it isn't, until you set the rock down, until you feel how your muscles have begun to tremble, until it is just you and the secrets, unsecret now in the wind, in your heart, in the cattails.

This suite of vignettes is not a story but a feeling, not a place but an in-between; the characters are themselves commas, a pause, a break in forward motion to rest in the liminal. Uncomplicated and rich, this work captures essence in three variations, and the reader is invited to be a fly on the wall of the characters' hearts: breathe and beat with them, and look for yourself in their stories.

Liem's poems are brisk, firm, ungentle in their movement through a tender heart, a tender moment, a tenderness. Apart, a collection of thoughts may only be thoughts, but together they are a feeling, and a story, and Liem's tightly constructed prose poems uncover a lifetime's worth of story settled just between, just underneath, the words we have been given.