Set on a Massachusetts farm in the 1960s, this memoir about the author's childhood, and the legacy of three generations of her family, is a vivid portrait of a young girl searching for meaning and beauty in a world where mother love - so fierce that it becomes pathological - cripples those whom it would nurture; where real and spiritual poverty, alcoholism, and despair pit themselves against the imaginative life; where nature and language become a creative child's only allies.

Of her family, award-winning poet Melissa Green writes: "I looked down at the old photograph and into the proud, angry, hurt, scheming, unforgiving, tender faces of the Greens. Their family was just like ours. Then I thought: it is ours. How did love get so mixed up with hatred? How did kindness turn to bitterness? Why was envy, resentment, fury, unhappiness, blame, and the deeply felt belief that life had cheated them, that they deserved better, at the heart of everything they said?

Their blood was in mine. Their sadness and defeat and defiance ran through my veins until they joined like rivers at my heart."

1. Alive with the feeling and color that distinguish its author's widely praised poems, this book richly evokes the process by which certain memories burn themselves indelibly into our minds, changing forever who we are.