Contains Mild Peril is a book permeated by anxiety, not fatal
threat, but the ambient manic hum of daily life. Precarity does something to us
at the level of language; it shapes the ways we see and say. Our current
climate ? political, environmental, economic ? engenders its own nervy music.
These poems channel this collective apprehension in ways both deeply personal
and instantly familiar. It is a collection that abounds in loss, in a sense of
being lost, and in the gnawing fear of losing, yet its speakers address us with
urgency. This is language in the throes of fighting back.