Poetry. "Refrain: a repeated call: a summoning of the listener to a certain kind of attention: a particular posture attuned to the musical structure of phrase and echo, sign and rhyme. Drawing on repetition and return, these poems repeat and amplify the ebb and flow of daily consciousness with its inner networks of memory, textuality, and longing. A refrain is melody recurring, always coming back into itself, repeated, yet changed, a cantus perpetuum delivering the impossible: the rescue of presence from its ongoing ruin, the occasion of mercy where 'the small rain down can rain.' What we long for--what calls to us--is what sustains us, even in its absence. In the end, 'all this poem has to give / to this world is / its own brokenness.'"--Patrick Pritchett