This second book by Andrea Werblin is filled with wry, savvy poems embodying cautiously accepted psychic discoveries (“your better synaptic self”) that gesture toward careful self-unmaskings. “So much music was misunderstood,” the speaker muses in the first version of the title poem, like the youthful self-delusions to which we all must wise up - their “Lyric exhausted, impermeable to sun.”

The lullaby for one fist of Werblin’s first book is muted here, but the speaker tells herself to accept what is, to “swear / it is nothing personal.” Although these current days of rest have the sound turned off, she knows she must “rehearse, rehearse” her human perseverance.