Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope and meaning when language falters —“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I /knew and knew and knew.”