"George Kalamaras follows the hound of his imagination through a landscape as American as Kankakee and Loosahatchie, scenting out Whitman and Lorca in a single poem and finding them both vital and belonging together. His exuberant intelligence is on fine display in work which, as Valery maintained, becomes the subject it both loves and creates. The entire collection can be seen as an extended ars poetica, letting us see the map and the means by which the poems find their way to the inevitable conclusions they, and we, could not have foreseen. In this sense, Kalamaras is also a shaman, and clearly a master of hounds. In their own words, these poems will make you "love the way love can love / the act of loving." —Dan Gerber, author of Particles: New & Selected Poems In Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes, "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken [to] concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound." I know this: poet George Kalamaras has found the hound. The bawl-mouthed hounds that inhabit these poems lead the poet and the poems deep into the physical woods and wetlands of the world, down the path into the world of the spirit, discovering all that must be bowed down to, and fully into the world of the self—the self as hound dog, as houndself, and as poet on an essential hunt that, like a poem, may never be finished but increasingly honors the luminous everything. —Veronica Patterson, author of Swan, What Shores?"—