From wildfire and war to bleached reefs and human frailty, Peggy Shumaker's new poems meditate on mortality. Her poems speak with elegiac force for lost languages, lost ancestors, lost ways of being. This work sharpens the edges of our perception, drawing on the inner life, on secrets that keep us alive. With language as lyrical as the natural world, the poems in "Gnawed Bones" nourish us.