“Maier has written a first book that doesn’t read like one, replete as it is with the evidence of a mature craft and an established vision. What frequently comes into that vision is a patterned world: it might be twin ranks of live oaks whose top branches entangle over an avenue or the flurried shadows of crows on the wing or other glimpses of the naturally paradisiacal that frame the humanly fallen. While keeping the lives of people at the center of the design, Maier gets poems as easily from the willow pattern on China as from the template of myth she sees in what she sees. Signs appear to her, also, of the literal sort. Patterns in the form of words—on cardboard over a market-gardener’s truck, on a license plate frame, or in fortune cookies—can launch her into the spirited vernacular rendered in this alphabet. Dark alphabet, it may be, but the poems are unsolemn, leavened by wit and brightened by metaphor, even when the subject is loss.”—Jason Sommer, author of The Man Who Sleeps in My Office,Other People's Troubles, and Lifting the Stone