This may be Melissa Helton's first book of poems, but don't let the idea of a "debut" mislead you. This is the work of a skilled and visionary artist. Each poem is a sharp blade with which Helton slices open the body of experience, exposes what it is to be human, what it is to be daughter, wife, mother, what it is to be a speck in the vast universe, what it means to smack inertia in the face and rock in the seductive knowledge of gravity and motion, love and regret, joy, sorrow, and transformation. This book is a work of pragmatism and grace. Darnell Arnoult, author of Galaxie Wagon: Poems Melissa Helton is a poet who is a subsistence farmer, which is to say she has pulled the trigger, she has held the knife, she has slit the throat. The same hands that wrote these poems know well the bone, the gristle, the meanness and grace from which we all primordial rise. That this is Helton's expertise would be enough to make me eager for her first book and for her last. But what I didn't know, and what you too might be startled to learn is that these poems, this book, is grown also of the celestial seed interred in us each-the sky's constellations and ours, the connect-the-dot stars. Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Render / An Apocalypse, senior editor of Oxford American Magazine In Inertia: A Study, Melissa Helton examines the states of physical motion and being. From stasis and waiting, (It seems the only perpetual living condition) the poet gathers momentum toward movement. Whether in the voice of an astronaut who muses, "Out in this/the airless mind of God, I float," or the maker of A Last to-Do List, the poems gather momentum and energy until the stasis of spirit is broken and life moves forward. Thoughtful, amusing, and at times, provocative, the poems take a fresh perspective on the metaphysical and physical state of being human. Jane Hicks, author of Driving with the Dead: Poems and Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia